Reader, I was there. It was shortly after 3am on 2 May 1997 when the Labour celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall turned from noisy exuberance at the prospect of a landslide election victory to unrestrained delirium about the epic scale of the losses being inflicted on the Tories. It was the result from Enfield Southgate that did it. When Michael Portillo, who had been widely tipped to become the next Conservative leader, was evicted from a seat that had previously looked impregnable, the Labour crowd erupted in visceral chanting of: “Out! Out! Out!” Loathed as the pomaded embodiment of the Tory arrogance and division of that era, he was one of seven cabinet ministers who were culled by the electoral reaper that night.
For his entertaining blow-by-blow account of events, Brian Cathcart chose the title: Were You Still Up for Portillo? A poll of Channel 4 viewers and Observer readers rated his humiliation “their third favourite moment of the 20th century”, one place ahead of the execution of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Mr Portillo later reinvented himself as the pastel-clad presenter of TV travelogues. While he may have put his election-defining expulsion from parliament behind him, it is still seared into Conservative folk memory.
Senior Tories have compelling cause to break out into cold sweats about what will be said in the early hours after the coming general election. Will we be asking one another: Were You Still Up for Rees-Mogg? And Gove? And Shapps? And Hunt? And Cleverly? And Mordaunt? Could folk even be asking: Were You Still Up for Sunak? A recent projection has suggested that things look so dire for the Tories that their leader could be in peril of losing his own seat in North Yorkshire.
That came from one of two mega-polls that have thickened the miasma of doom enveloping the Conservatives by suggesting they could be heading for a defeat as calamitous, and possibly even more catastrophic, than the one they experienced 27 years ago. You could argue that this is not telling us anything that wasn’t already obvious. Labour has been sustaining a lead of 20 points or so in the poll of polls for the past 18 months. These latest surveys have transfixed frightened Tories for three main reasons. First, because they use unusually large sample sizes and MRP, the snappy acronym for a technique called multilevel regression and post-stratification, to translate the data into a projection of the composition of the next parliament were the country voting tomorrow. Second, the MRP method has had a decent predictive record over recent elections. And third, MRP aims to forecast outcomes seat by seat. It is scary for Tory MPs that their party languishes so far behind in the headline polls; it is even more terrifying to be told that they are individually fated to be felled. The YouGov projection, published last week, has the Tories plunging to just 155 MPs, Labour surging to more than 400, and Sir Keir Starmer enthroned at Number 10 on a Tony Blair-like 154-seat majority. The Survation analysis, commissioned by Best for Britain and published over the Easter weekend, was even more of a bed-wetter for Tories. It projected that they would be crushed to fewer than 100 MPs while Labour would have 468 in the next parliament, resulting in an enormous 286-seat majority.
There’s a consolation that the prime minister and his people cling to. This is the notion that many voters who are presently saying they are undecided will end up plumping for the Tories come election day. Yet most of the pollsters already factor in an assumption that Don’t Knows who were Conservative supporters in 2019 are more likely to break to the Tories when we get to the crunch. If that assumption is faulty or exaggerated, then the pollsters may not be being too harsh about Tory prospects, but too generous. The possibility that the Conservatives could be staggering towards near annihilation is taken seriously at high levels of government. Talking to a member of the cabinet recently, he remarked, without any prompting from me, that he didn’t find it inconceivable that his party would suffer a fate similar to that which befell Canada’s Progressive Conservative party in 1993. A nine-year stretch in power was brutally terminated when they were reduced to a rump of just two MPs.
Predictions that their party is at risk of an extinction-level election result do not horrify all Tories. There’s one gang who relish and promote these apocalyptic polls. That’s the band, mainly on the right of the party, who are already agitating for the removal of Mr Sunak. They plan to step up their campaign to defenestrate him from Downing Street after the expected evisceration of the Conservatives at May’s local government elections. This mob are undeterred by the argument that the Tories will look utterly absurd if they change leader yet again. Like the frantic gambler at the craps table who is already massively in debt, they reckon that things are so bad for their party that it has nothing left to lose by making one last desperate hurl of the dice.
All manna from heaven for Labour? If Sir Keir Starmer is truly on course for a super-majority, it would look even more impressive for being such a remarkable turnaround from Labour’s result in 2019, its worst since 1935. Yet predictions of a big win do not trigger elation in the Labour leader and his inner circle. Angsty is a better description of how they feel about these polls. In his war against any hint of complacency, Sir Keir tells colleagues that they should fight as if “we are five points behind”. That’s hard to keep credible when pollsters are telling you that, with a maximum of nine months to go before polling day, you’re in landslide territory. Another anxiety in Labour circles is the feedback loop between polling and the electorate. All the evidence suggests that this will be a “time for a change” election and Britain is firmly resolved to purge itself of Conservative government. That is not the same as being able to say that the country is keen to see Labour installed in power with a colossal parliamentary majority. So Sir Keir’s strategists fret about the impact of polls like these on the intentions of voters who might be leery of Labour unbound.
Should Sir Keir desire the kind of mega-majority being suggested by these polls? It is obviously more appealing to a prime minister to have masses of troops behind him at Westminster rather than trying to manage parliament and pass legislation with a mini-majority. A stonking victory may also improve Labour’s chances of being in power long enough to try to fulfil its leader’s promise to deliver “a decade of national renewal”. It is important, though, for Labour to note that this is by no means guaranteed. The Liberals won a triple-figure landslide majority in 1906, but it melted away in just four years. The 145-seat majority secured by Labour in 1945 crumbled to just five at the 1950 election and the Tories were back in government by 1951.
A Labour super-majority won’t mean an easy life for a Starmer government. It will still have to grapple with a grim inheritance. Having a lot of Labour MPs won’t magically lift the rate of economic growth or instantly repair ravaged public services. Should it stumble, a big-majority Labour government will find it hard to blame anyone else for its failures. One risk to Sir Keir from winning large is that this could raise unrealistic public expectations about how quickly and dramatically Labour can reform and rebuild Britain. Another potential problem is keeping a huge body of Labour MPs content and productive rather than seeing the parliamentary party turn fractious and factional. Politics abhors a vacuum. Big-majority governments have a tendency to generate opposition from within themselves. The back-to-back landslides enjoyed by Tony Blair were marred by the endless and toxic TB-GB conflicts between him and Gordon Brown, his restless chancellor.
Many of the Blair generation, including the man himself, would now say that they wasted time in their early period in office. They were too obsessed with hoarding their landslide and not sufficiently energetic about exploiting it to press on with difficult but vital reforms. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher, though her 1979 majority was much more modest, quickly got cracking with her radical right revolution.
There’s a moral here for Sir Keir and his putative cabinet. When it comes to majorities, it is not so much the size that counts as what you do with it.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
