Picture Sir Keir Starmer in his Downing Street study this evening. His No10 steps speech done, Britain’s new Prime Minister has just written his letters of last resort to the Royal Navy’s four nuclear missile submarine commanders. A sobering moment but also a reminder of the awesome power Sir Keir has just inherited. Who could then deny him a moment to lean back in Rishi Sunak’s old chair and glance up at the TV.
On it are the scenes of utter carnage that voters inflicted on the men and women who ran the country for the past 14 years. More than 200 Tory MPs not just out of power but out of a job too, defenestrated entirely in the biggest bloodbath of the Conservative Party’s history.
Farewell Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Gillian Keegan, Mark Harper, Michelle Donelan, Johnny Mercer, Liam Fox, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, the biggest scalp of all.
My enemies are slain and I am victorious, Sir Keir might be tempted to think. And that would be the first massive mistake of his premiership. Because this is not his victory, and neither is it Labour’s.
This is not Sir Keir Starmer’s victory, and neither is it Labour’s
What should our new PM’s real takeaways be from last night’s electoral thunderbolt?
Takeaway one: Of all the superlatives and jaw-dropping statistics that it served up, this is the most pertinent: the combined vote share won by Labour (34 per cent) and the Conservatives (23 per cent) is the lowest for Britain’s two top parties ever.
Almost half the country voted for someone else yesterday. Turnout was also well down on 2019, and by as much as 10 per cent in some areas. The usual people who govern us have never been more unpopular. Neither does Sir Keir take office with any personal affection. He has a minus 19 point satisfaction rating, and his own Holborn and St Pancras constituency vote was halved from where it was in 2019.
Forget words like landslide and the size of Labour’s comfortable majority. For this result they only mislead, and are far more an eccentric product of our first-past-the-post voting system.
The numbers are crystal clear: the nation delivered a massive rejection of the Tories for their years of turmoil, infighting and self-promotion, not a loving embrace for Sir Keir and the Labour Party. He didn’t win it, they lost it big time.
Takeaway two: It wasn’t just the Conservative Party’s failings, big as they were. Voters are angry, and they are angry everywhere.
Years of flatlining incomes and living standards that Covid and the energy price crisis only worsened have seen incumbents across the world battered — most recently France’s Emmanuel Macron this week.
Many of yesterday’s voters are also scared, another global pattern. They recognise the world they now live in less and less, with many of the old securities they could once rely on gone.
It’s now a world of mass migration and extraordinarily fast technological change, as AI and robots replace humans from factory lines to lawyers’ chambers.
The moment Sunak conceded the election at 4.42am today, all of that became Sir Keir’s problem.
It’s his job now to work out how he can dissipate some of that immense anger. How to reassure them. How he can return some of that security to these confused lives, and rebuild so much trust that has been lost from our politics.
Given Labour’s bleak economic inheritance, none of this will not be easy. But all of it is possible, if — and it’s a big if — Sir Keir is prepared to be bold, unlike his pathetically tepid election manifesto.
If Sir Keir fails, his fate should now be obvious to him. Because waiting in the wings are the populists
Takeaway three: Here’s the good news for him. The new PM does have an enormous opportunity. What a difference a mammoth majority can make in Westminster. What things he can now do with a united party that isn’t riddled with divisions and feuds. And that power and authority can be put to maximum use if he gets on with it immediately while he still has a fair wind behind him. Not in two or three years when his army of new MPs start fretting about their seats in the 2029 general election.
Takeaway four: If Sir Keir fails, his fate should now be obvious to him. Because waiting in the wings are the populists. Nigel Farage was also elected last night, at the eighth attempt, along with three other Reform MPs. It’s the House of Commons foothold that Farage has sought for 20 years and he’ll waste no opportunity to skilfully exploit it.
Unlike Marine Le Pen’s triumph in France or Giorgia Meloni’s in Italy last year, Britain managed to escape the global lurch to hard-Right populism yesterday. But what has also changed is the electorate’s extraordinary volatility. The huge numbers who happily gave Boris Johnson’s Tories a landslide four and a half years ago turned on them mercilessly yesterday. They no longer believe they owe party allegiance to anybody. If they’re still angry, they will do the same again next time.
Sir Keir will not get a second chance in 2029. Moderate, centre ground politics in Britain didn’t win this general election. It was given a reprieve. It will not get another.
No winners in battle of the pollsters
Who won this general election’s battle of the pollsters? It wasn’t a great night for any of them. Thanks to their uber-complicated MRP modelling, all of them overcooked the scale of Labour’s majority. More in Common were closest with a prediction of 210, followed closely by YouGov on 212 and JL Partners on 234.
The wooden spoon by some margin goes to Survation, who projected a massive Labour majority of 318, and that the Tories would be down to 64 seats. Time for a less complicated model?
Sign of the times: first by-election on the way?
A new MP who ousted a prominent Tory last night has some explaining to do. It turns out a person filmed ripping down a rival’s election signs bears an uncanny resemblance to just that new MP. Destroying signs is a criminal offence and the police are investigating. This could get messy. The first by-election of the new Parliament? Watch this space.
