Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, described by Hosking as "one of the most remarkably unelectable people ever to present himself to the electorate - disliked by most of his MPs and loathed by the public" espoused some very radical policies which appealed to many young people who were previously non-voters. He campaigned in a relaxed and confident manner, not dissimilar to our now departed Sir John Key.
Mrs May's campaign, by contrast was wooden and repetitive and she avoided face to face encounters with Corbyn. In a word she was overconfident.
At a first glance, there are some important lessons for New Zealand politicians and those, like me, who set themselves up as commentators.
Lesson number one is that political polls are becoming a much less reliable predictor of election outcomes. Only one of the many polls conducted in the last week of the British election campaign got even close to predicting the outcome of a less than two percentage points gap between the Labour and Conservative vote tallies.
There have always been rogue polls. The TVNZ poll in May which had the Maori Party on 4 per cent and caused all sorts of excitement in that party was corrected in June with the Maori Party vote clocked at the much more normal 1 per cent. It is unlikely that the Maori Party lost three-quarters of its support in a month. It is much more probable that the 4 per cent in May was a rogue result.
This phenomenon does not explain what now seem to be systemic shortcomings in research techniques which have been prescient until recently.
I have made the point in a previous column that pundits like the academic political scientist Claire Robinson who make predictions on the basis of past polling trends are now on very marshy ground and take great risks with their reputations.
Lesson two would seem to be that chronic non-voters can, under certain circumstances, be encouraged or inspired to participate.
Final turn-out figures from the British Election are not yet known but anecdotal reports suggest that although Britons could be forgiven for suffering voting fatigue, the turn-out rate is up, and significant numbers of young people have been attracted to participate in the election.
A personal friend who I lunched with this week and who has business interests in London went to a Jeremy Corbyn rally in that city late last year and told me that he was the oldest person in a room full of young and enthusiastic Corbyn fans.
New Zealand Labour would be well advised to closely examine their sister British Labour party's techniques and policies. In excess of a million Kiwis enrolled to vote but failed to do so in the 2014 poll. Inspiring even a small minority of these potential voters to get our and support Labour would radically change the outcome of our own election in September.
A third lesson is that good campaigning counts.
Theresa May's confidence led her to eschew debates with Corbyn and to allow seemingly damaging policies to explode around her and debilitate her campaign. A policy aimed at altering elderly people's contributions to their end of life care got dubbed a "Dementia Tax" and eclipsed many sane and attractive proposals.
Labour adopted radical but attractive policies like (mostly) free tertiary education and defended them well. The normal Tory attack around how such policies were to be funded was blunted by a 'soak the rich" taxation policy.
Teresa May called the election in the well-founded belief that she would increase her Conservative Party's majority. She now has no overall majority and probably a career-ending headache.
