Frances Ryan & Aditya Chakrabortty
And just like that, Britain kicked the Conservative party into touch. Labour’s enduring poll lead long signalled victory for Keir Starmer – and this, coupled with an uninspiring campaign, resulted in a muted election for one so seismic. But watching the map turn from blue to red overnight, it was hard not to feel a kind of cathartic cleanse. This was close to a Tory wipeout by any definition. Former prime minister Liz Truss was spectacularly ousted, alongside a spate of cabinet members, including Penny Mordaunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Grant Shapps. Culture-war peddler Miriam Cates lost her battle, while Ben “vasectomies are free for the jobless” Bradley was cut loose.
Nothing will spoil Labour’s thumping landslide, but voters hurt by Gaza and other concerns dealt several blows. Iain Duncan Smith, early architect of austerity, survived because of a split vote with a former Labour candidate. Reform took only a few seats but their national vote share should trouble Starmer.
At its heart, this election was less about welcoming Labour in than getting the Tories out. From austerity to Brexit to Partygate, voters have lived through an unprecedented era of cruelty, chaos and corruption. If a week is a long time in politics, 14 years of Conservative misrule has practically been a life sentence.
Many don’t believe anything will change with a Labour government, let alone soon. In the coming months, Starmer must show it can. For now, it is enough to sit and savour what has ended. To draw a line under the worst of governments and remember the millions of lives made poorer, sicker, more afraid. Today is for Windrush, disability benefit deaths and Grenfell. It is for food banks, “go home” vans and the rape clause. For PPE contracts, cancer patients and Rwanda flights.
Goodbye to the vandals of Britain. How fitting they destroyed themselves in the end.
The most worrying story this morning must be that the hard right will now sit in parliament. Under party-funding rules, Nigel Farage’s group will receive cash from the taxpayer. He will be entitled to even more airtime. Measured by share of the vote, the third-biggest political force in the UK today is Reform. One in seven voters support a party that includes representatives who praised Hitler as “brilliant” and called black people “jungle bunnies”. Reform organisers have had links with fascist organisations. One of the activists helping Farage win Clacton was filmed using the P-word to describe Rishi Sunak, calling Islam a “death cult” and demanding the army “just shoot” refugees. These people and those views have only gained legitimacy in this election.
For years the media has lapped up Farage. For the most part, it has treated him as entertainment rather than a threat. The BBC has put him on comedy panel shows. But the braying, sour admirer of Enoch Powell is a threat – a threat to the millions of ethnic minority people in this country and a threat to British democracy. Reform is not a party, but a limited company majority-owned by one Nigel Paul Farage. His rise has been bankrolled by sugar-daddy businessmen and he now appears well placed to establish himself as the natural magnet for dark money in British politics.
As he became MP for Clacton last night, Farage said: “We’re coming for Labour, be in no doubt about that.” It is no idle boast. Cast your eye across what Labour still considers its “red wall”. Vast swathes were won back by Keir Starmer last night, but in seat after seat Reform is now the main challenger: South Shields, Houghton and Sunderland South, Easington, Sunderland Central, North Durham, Llanelli, Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr … the list goes on and on and on. It includes Angela Rayner’s Ashton-under-Lyne, and Jonathan Reynolds’s Stalybridge.
Few politicians are as adept at spinning a victim narrative as Farage, and he will point to his side’s 14% public support equalling only 0.6% of MPs and say: you’ve been robbed, just as you were on immigration. In some of these seats, the results were extremely close; in many, there were just a few thousand votes’ difference between the centre left and the far right. The message is clear: seats that Labour once assumed were its own by inheritance now face serious challenge from a demagogue who takes his inspiration from Donald Trump.
That name shows us what happens when the hard right moves into the void left by the political mainstream. Yet throughout this election campaign, both Tories and Labour ducked out of challenging Farage. Starmer’s team pulled its candidate out of Clacton and frogmarched him up to the Midlands. The Labour government taking shape this weekend will have to make urgent improvements to the daily lives of voters, especially in those de-industrialised areas that were left for dead decades ago. That is a huge challenge given the austerity politics that look set to dominate this decade.
The nicest thing to be said about the Conservatives’ election performance is that they managed to avoid a total wipeout. The predictions by some pollsters of the party being reduced to double digits proved a little wide of the mark – with Rishi Sunak instead slumping to 119 seats and counting. That means they remain His Majesty’s official opposition and avoid the humiliation of being treated like a fringe party by the broadcasters.
But this is where any crumbs of comfort stop for Sunak. Ultimately the Tories have suffered catastrophic losses that they will struggle to recover from in one term. The casualties include plenty of so-called Tory big beasts, including Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps. But perhaps more damning is the areas they lost in – seats that have long been blue, from Aldershot to Surrey Heath, as well as the gains made in the Midlands and north in recent elections withering away. The rebuild will be hard.
To make matters worse, there will be a small but noisy intake of Reform MPs including Nigel Farage, Lee Anderson and Richard Tice. This group has the potential to cause mayhem and divide the Tories further as they try to regroup and recover. The question that will dominate the coming Tory leadership contest will be what to do about Farage and his party – hug them close or push them away? The voters turning to Reform played a large role in the Tory party’s disastrous showing. In parts of the red wall, Farage can now claim his party is second to Labour.
The only other small ray of light for the Tories is that, despite Labour’s landslide victory, the early signs are that its vote share has not risen significantly from 2019 – so the size of the majority may not reflect a rush of public enthusiasm for Starmer. The difference between the two parties is a mix of Labour’s efficient campaigning in swing seats and the collapse of the Tory vote. But given this is the worst result in the Tories’ history, this will likely be little comfort to them in the coming years in opposition.
Five thousand one hundred and seventy-three days. That’s how long it is since Labour last governed. It shows how monumental this victory is. I hope new MPs can squeeze in time to celebrate and breathe before parliament resumes. It also illustrates just how novel government will be for many MPs picked for departmental posts, with New Labour veterans dwindling. There’s only so much that shadow roles, briefings from experts and party grandees or life experience can do to prepare them for the mammoth responsibilities, the processes, culture and politics of Whitehall, and the scramble to “do something” about every unexpected controversy on the front pages.
Party figures have clearly been hard at work drawing up plans, but few are likely to be developed enough for the civil service to act on immediately – particularly with parliamentary recess looming. Even a likely shortened recess is a significant headache given the political significance of delivering within the first 100 days – the timescale Labour has already committed to for bringing forward legislation on its flagship employment reforms.
International affairs, from a Nato summit in the US to a European Political Community summit held here, both this month, will also take up precious time that Keir Starmer may have wanted to spend making domestic headway.
Labour will certainly have a string of high-profile announcements to unveil imminently and sound like it means business – but it faces a tricky balancing act between promising to meet high public expectations of change, and dampening them given Labour’s strict fiscal rules. With Nigel Farage warning he’s “coming for” Labour, the pressure to spend big will grow louder by the week.
Responsibility for this historic defeat lies ultimately with the Conservative party’s abandonment of its traditional and trusted values of conservatism, and its replacing of these with the dog-whistle politics of division. In becoming a party that stated only what it stood against, eventually it stood for nothing, becoming a party of nowhere. It didn’t have to be this way. When Rishi Sunak personally decided to row back on net zero and climate action, promoting new oil and gas and opening a new coalmine, I stated that this would become the greatest mistake of his premiership. It turns out it was also his greatest political error, as the party lost not only in the “red wall” but across swathes of seats in the southern “blue wall”. Seats where voters believed the Conservatives cared about conserving our environment turned against Sunak’s hardline rhetoric.
I had no choice but to resign and leave the party when it turned against its climate record. Net zero is the greatest economic opportunity of the decade, bringing with it jobs, growth and regeneration. Sunak instead preferred to follow Reform’s corrosive culture war politics, which brought zero votes. The same could be said for the party’s incessant attacks on migrants, on international humanitarian law, on international students, on our institutions and even family meals on a Friday. Again, the pattern was the same: hate not hope, blaming others, blaming each other. It didn’t just lose the plot, it forgot where the theatre even was.
The country has not only voted for change: it has voted overwhelmingly to deliver the net zero mission that Keir Starmer has set out as one of his government’s five key priorities. Putting politics aside, we now have the opportunity to restore the consensus on climate action that is sorely needed. Carbon dioxide knows no political colours. We must all now work together in this new parliament to deliver the change and results that our environment urgently requires.
