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.
