It was just before breakfast, at a leisure centre in Norfolk, that this particular era of Conservatism came to an end. A white-faced Liz Truss left the stage without a word, after losing her supposedly impregnable seat to Labour.
Though Keir Starmer had effectively won the election some hours before, this was middle England’s final, cleansing act of revenge against the former prime minister most strongly associated – admittedly against stiff competition from her predecessor – with that particular strain of blithe incompetence that has ruined lives for too long. Justice was done. It felt less like an election than a miraculously bloodless revolution.
That Tory votes scattered in all directions on Thursday night, even as the SNP imploded in Scotland, suggests that what we have seen is less some great national shift to the left than an explosive howl of rage at two tired, failed incumbents presiding over a cost of living crisis. The end result was a jaw-dropping majority won with astonishing efficiency from a small share of the vote, with volatile new forms of identity politics – pro-Palestinian independents, Reform’s grim anti-immigrant populism, Green radicalism – bursting through the old two-party system like Japanese knotweed cracking a patio. The nation is very clear about what it doesn’t want but divided over what it does, and faintly suspicious about any politician’s chances of achieving it.
While Rishi Sunak said he felt the country’s anger, Starmer recognised its weary disillusionment. Politicians before him had, he suggested, acknowledged the insecurity marring so many lives before doing precious little about it. “I want to say very clearly to those people: not this time.”
So now for the difficult bit: delivering where so many western governments – not just here in Britain but in rustbelt America and parts of France facing similar challenges – have previously failed on the promise of a better life for the overlooked and forgotten, while knowing full well that if he fails there is something darker waiting in the wings. “Voting Tory, voting Labour – honestly, what difference has it made? It’s the same relentless decline, just delivered by a politician wearing a different colour rosette,” the Reform candidate Rupert Lowe tweeted, the day before he won the Labour target seat of Great Yarmouth. It’s the classic hard-right message – everything is broken, conventional politics has failed, so why not think the unthinkable? – and it worked too well for comfort this time.
Starmer’s answer to it is, correctly, as much economic as political. He is banking on growth not just as a means to fund better public services but effectively to glue society back together again, recognising that prosperous, confident countries don’t descend into the same dark places as impoverished ones fighting over scraps. His plans for “mission boards” to drive the delivery of his manifesto promises across Whitehall show a welcome seriousness, compared with the era of Boris Johnson missing Cobra meetings. But it won’t be long before a restless Labour party starts pushing him to do more than work his way methodically down the checklist, for fear of squandering this once-in-a-lifetime majority. Interestingly, polling conducted by the public affairs agency Portland into what may make 2024 Labour voters withdraw their support from a Labour government shows they would be far more upset by a failure to fix public services than by the breaking of promises not to raise tax.
But for now there are other ways of combining Starmer’s unwavering focus and determination with a dash more boldness. The big change since 1997, as the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, tells anyone who will listen, is devolution: Labour’s city mayors have been grappling for years with the problems its new cabinet will face and are begging to be used as incubators, piloting ideas on the government’s behalf that can be swiftly rolled out nationally if they work.
In Greater Manchester, for example, Burnham aims to build 10,000 social homes and is pioneering a model for reviving dying high streets in outlying boroughs, building affordable flats for the young and priced-out in town centres as a means of bringing those areas back to life. But ideally, he would like a Labour government to find ways of making publicly owned land available for housebuilding at below market rate – the holy grail for building cheap housing at scale, though currently blocked by Treasury accounting rules – and suspend the right to buy council houses. If that’s further than Starmer is willing to go right now, he shouldn’t dismiss the option of using mayors as outriders to gently push the boundaries on all sorts of knotty problems.
At Westminster, meanwhile, the new prime minister is right to aim for continuity in cabinet jobs wherever possible, giving his ministers time to get their feet properly under the table. But at junior level, he should be characteristically ruthless about bringing on new talent. This is a starry but also unusually experienced new intake, peppered with talented retreads and former special advisers who won’t need six months to work out which lever to pull. And it’s time, now, that is of the essence.
For mingled with the joy in this victory is a faint unease born of knowing that it’s only five years since Boris Johnson surfed into Downing Street on an equally unstoppable wave of glory, and that we are most probably entering a world where the mood of the crowd turns dizzyingly fast. Keir Starmer has a gargantuan task ahead of him. For today at least, the whole country should wish him well with it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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