Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
A new dawn has broken, has it not. But the difference between 1997, when Tony Blair famously greeted victory with these words, and the rather more anticlimactic muddle of this year’s local elections, is that this isn’t quite the dawn Labour was after. The good news for Keir Starmer is that there is a profound if very unpredictable realignment under way in British politics, with the ground starting to crack beneath the Tories’ feet in their southern strongholds much as it once did for Labour in their northern ones. If the next general election were 10 or even five years away, things would be looking very sunny indeed. As it is, Britain may well go to the polls while Labour is still in an awkward transitional stage, trying to make sense of a past seemingly dead and a future yet unborn. Not so much glad confident morning as one greeted half-dressed and hopping about, with one foot caught in your trousers.
True, toast will have been dropped over Tory breakfast tables at news of Wandsworth and Westminster falling to Labour. There were breakthroughs, too, in places such as Cumberland – home to Workington Man, archetype for the 2019 red wall voter, and split between three Labour target seats – or Chingford on the border between London and Essex, part of Iain Duncan Smith’s seat. Labour canvassers in some parts of the south particularly are gleefully reporting the return of the “I’ve always been a Conservative, but …” voter, Tories who simply can’t condone the behaviour of their own party. (Even those who swallowed their doubts about illicit partying aren’t happy: 53% of those voting Conservative on Thursday thought their government hadn’t done enough to help with the cost of living, according to a TUC/Opinium poll that suggests something in the Treasury must surely now give.) Liberal remain-voting Tories, who have felt like a persecuted minority in their party ever since Brexit, are meanwhile starting to snap.
