Background to the Campaign: From Confidence and Supply to the Oven-Ready Deal

Abstract

British politics entered a period of extraordinary flux following the narrow votes in favour of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum and the Conservatives in the 2017 General Election. Although the latter campaign saw Theresa May returned as Prime Minister, her authority was much diminished due to the Tories’ loss of their overall majority and her being forced to seek a confidence and supply arrangement with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists to stay in office. The resulting hung parliament was dominated by Brexit and, when the government was unable to make progress over the issue, May resigned to be replaced by Boris Johnson. Previously the leader of the Leave campaign, Johnson would make ‘Getting Brexit Done’ his mission and core campaign slogan in a General Election he pressed for only months into his premiership. Regardless of the merits of the new Prime Minister’s provisional so-called oven-ready deal with the European Union, the policy appeared sufficiently intelligible to a public by now familiar with this controversial topic.