'Rude awakening ahead for Boris Johnson in the nightmare before Christmas'

Well, if hard Brexit does now happen, after next year’s trade talks, Labour will only have itself to blame. Three times it rejected Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB) which contained guarantees on workers rights and the environment that have been shorn from Boris Johnson’s deal.

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Mrs May’s WAB would also have kept Britain as a whole in the regulatory orbit of the EU single market, not just Northern Ireland. So the sum total of Mr Corbyn’s achievement, three years since the EU referendum, is that he’s actually made Brexit worse.

Labour’s equivocation over the election date was the culmination of one of the worst failures of democratic opposition in British political history. Mr Corbyn has been comprehensively outplayed by a divided Tory Government with no majority, incompetent leadership and a “liar” in Number 10. What a record to put before the voters in six weeks’ time.

But wait a moment, because this doesn’t mean that the election is going to be a walkover for Boris Johnson. This is likely to be the most unpredictable election, since, well, the last one – and the Tories certainly shouldn’t be counting any chickens, chlorinated or otherwise.

For a start, there is no great enthusiasm for Mr Johnson’s Brexit deal, and it will undergo rigorous scrutiny over the next six weeks. People are asking: why was Mr Johnson so reluctant to let MPs scrutinise his wonderful Withdrawal Bill? What did he have to hide?

As for the opinion polls, Mrs May was further ahead in 2017 when she went for a snap election that people thought she couldn’t lose. Far from delivering the expected 100-seat majority, she ended up losing her majority and being at the beck and call of the DUP.

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History doesn’t repeat itself very often, but it certainly could here. For a start, Mr Johnson stands to lose 10 of those 13 Scottish Tory seats that Ruth Davidson helped deliver in 2017.

Ms Davidson’s decision to take up a lucrative job with a PR company, while still earning a comfortable salary as an MSP, hasn’t helped their prospects. Most of the Scottish Tory MPs are complete unknowns. Christmas party quiz: name all 13 Scottish Tory MPs. I only got six.

The resurgent Liberal Democrats could also eat into the Tory total in the south-west of England where they lost so badly to David Cameron’s Tories in 2015. Then there are all the dedicated Remainers in London who’ll vote tactically.

And then there are the 20-odd “unwhipped” ex-Tories, like the former Chancellor Philip Hammond. They owe Mr Johnson nothing and could do a lot of damage in the campaign. Nor can the PM rely on Labour Brexit supporters in the North of England turning Tory – not with “Bullingdon Boris” in charge.

Mr Johnson may or may not be a serial liar, but he embodies, unlike his predecessor, Britain’s privileged upper classes. The Conservative Party he leads is now further to the right than in the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Younger voters positively detest Mr Johnson, whom many regard as a fascist. Just take a wander down the lists on Twitter. They are heavily engaged in politics right now, not just because of the Brexit they loathe, but also because of tuition fees, lack of jobs, unaffordable houses and so on. They are likely to vote in unprecedented numbers this time.

The Tories are desperately trying to insist that “austerity is over”, but it patently isn’t – not in the NHS, local services, schools. And anyway, who was responsible for austerity in the first place?

The UK has been through the longest period of wage stagnation in 200 years, and with crumbling infrastructure, insecure jobs, rising inequality, there is a lot of ammunition to use against the PM.

So, despite its recent incompetence, there is paradoxically everything for Labour to play for. Except of course in Scotland, where the SNP remains very much in charge – though since Nicola Sturgeon would probably back a minority Corbyn government, on a Brexit referendum at least, that isn’t as bad for Labour as it sounds.

Indeed, Labour will have to fight a very bad campaign to leave Mr Johnson with anything like the lead he has right now in the polls. OK – that is not at all impossible, given the state of the Labour Party.

Labour is at war with itself, and many Labour MPs hate the thought of campaigning for Mr Corbyn. Expect further accusations of anti-Semitism to be raised in the course of a dirty campaign, not least by the many Labour MPs who have left the party because of it.

Labour has a divided leadership and Mr Corbyn is already looking and sounding like yesterday’s man. The architect of Labour’s much-praised 2017 election manifesto, Andrew Fisher, says he wants to quit. The People’s Vote campaign, which should be helping Labour, is also at war with itself.

The SNP too will have to conduct a very bad campaign not to win its expected 50 seats. However, it will have to get its message sorted. About the only thing that could go wrong for Ms Sturgeon is if the election started to look like a ballot on another independence referendum.

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Scottish voters, even many supporters of the SNP, are referendum-ed out. Yet Ms Sturgeon is requesting another two of them: one on Brexit and another on Scottish independence (and the latter could end up being two referendums now the SNP has conceded the principle of a confirmatory ballot). She should probably confine herself to promising to apply for a Section 30 order, and then focusing on the NHS, housing and “the hated Tories” as the SNP leader calls them.

This is going to be a fractious election, with bad-tempered voters resenting the interruption to their festive shopping. And after the parties suffer the trials of campaigning in the dark, they could find the result is another hung parliament. That would be the real nightmare before Christmas.