No, it really isn’t like 1997. Not even close. The morning after that landslide, I met a pillar of the Tory party in the office. He beamed at me: “Doesn’t feel like we’re under a Socialist tyranny, does it?” The sense of buoyancy which followed Sir Tony Blair’s victory did not last but it was real. This time round, the feeling is simple relief rather than elation. The PM, as we must get used to calling Sir Keir Starmer, tried very hard for uplift: “Walk into the morning”, he declared at about five in the morning, “the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again, on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.” A nation blinked sleepily, then went back to bed.
There’s a reason for the muted ecstasy at the extraordinary scale of the Labour victory. Just over a third of those who voted, 34 per cent, voted for the party. And on the back of it he’s got 412 seats, an imperial margin, enough to be immune from rebellion, indifferent to criticism.
Then there’s the other figure which should give him pause, but almost certainly won’t. Four in 10 of us didn’t vote at all, eight per cent less than last time. None of the Aboves made up the biggest bloc of the electorate. Labour’s vote share was less than Jeremy Corbyn got in 2017, less than Theresa May got.
Let’s spell this out: this was not a resounding affirmation of Sir Keir or of Labour; it was a resounding rejection of the Tories at least by those who could be bothered to turn out. People remembered who gave them Liz Truss — and a nation finds itself in debt to the Turnip Taliban of South Norfolk for giving her the bird. But in Witney the same happened in the seat of the man, David Cameron, who made Liz Truss possible. Ditto in Uxbridge, in Boris Johnson’s seat. And in Maidenhead, in Theresa May’s. Out, out, out. What does that tell you?
There is something cathartic about an election. It is an opportunity for voters to get their own back
The other sobering reality of the poll is the extent to which it doesn’t represent actual votes. So, Labour gets 34 per cent of the vote and 412 seats; Reform gets 15 per cent of the vote and four seats. To put it another way, Reform gets four million votes and four seats; the Lib Dems get 3.5 million and 71 seats, Labour 9.6 million and 412 seats.
This is not to argue that the electoral system should change. First past the post is based on representation for individual constituencies, which is good, and provides relative stability in governments, which is also good. But what we are entitled to ask is that Labour should maintain a degree of humility in victory, the equivalent of one of those Roman slaves riding in Sir Keir’s chariot during the victory parade, going “35 per cent” in his ear.
In practice, it’s unlikely. This is a bad outcome for democracy. A Commons majority this big means that Sir Keir can do what he likes and can afford to ignore any rebellion on any issue. The temptation will be, as in Sir Tony Blair’s time, to rule in practice with a small coterie: sofa government as it was then. And if, as the adage goes, a government is only as good as its opposition, then we’re in for a bad five years.
On the bright side, the Tories have been put out of their misery: we’d have been more impressed by news of cabinet ministers losing their seats if we knew any of their names. Does anyone lament the departure of Lucy Frazer, the Culture Secretary who knew nothing about culture? As Rory Stewart recently reminded us, no sooner did a minister start to get a grip on his department than he was moved on.
There is something cathartic about an election. It is an opportunity for voters to get their own back. It is a chance to take revenge on the Tory grassroots and grandees for the humiliation that was Liz Truss. It’s payback time for partygate. It’s revenge for the debacle of HS2; has anyone kept track of the billions that were squandered on it that could have been spent on humdrum things like signalling or tracks? Or the second and third lockdowns? Then there was the misreading of Brexit. So many scores to settle.
The trouble is, of course, that Rishi Sunak happens to be the last boy at the table when this particular pass the parcel came to rest. He’s paying the price not just for his own stupid errors (740,000 net migration in one year) and failure of vision (his one big idea was a crackdown on smoking) but for the failures of his predecessors. That’s unfair, but that’s politics.
Sir Keir and Labour may rather fancy themselves as the Sunlight of Hope — the old poster, Greet The Dawn: Give Labour a Chance, sums it up — but the reality is that this was a negative vote, a least-bad option.
So, it’s not exactly glad confident morning so much as the feeling that Sir Keir can’t do that much worse than his predecessors. Still, we must be grateful that the country got the chance to vent its spleen and that the losers sucked it up. Not everyone does.
