Labour hard work results in landslide

Congratulations to Keir Starmer on leading the Labour Party to its first election victory in 19 years. It is on course to win around 412 seats, giving him a majority of 174 on the scale of Tony Blair’s 179 landslide in 1997. One of the peculiarities of the UK’s first past the post voting (FPTP) system means that Labour has been delivered a huge parliamentary majority despite only winning around 35% of the share of the national vote and largely because the Conversative vote collapsed.

?Looking back at the last six weeks, the result was never really in any doubt. ?However, if you go back just to the last election in December 2019, it is an extraordinary achievement. Then under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn Labour was reduced to 203, its lowest number since 1935. ?Having been elected party leader in April 2020, Starmer has undertaken a quiet revolution, developing which can be funded by putting in place fiscal measures which don’t alarm business, but which address the issues which are the electorate are most concerned about - cost of living, the NHS, education, housing, security. He has also effectively eliminated any traces of antisemitism which so tainted the party under Corbyn. There wasn’t much fanfare about his leadership of the party, some have called him boring. But as an Arsenal fan of a certain age he will remember the glory days of the club when they may have been taunted by chants of “boring, boring Arsenal” but their trophy cabinet was full.?

?An important element of his gaining control of the party was to develop a cohort of prospective parliamentary candidates who he and the leadership know and can count on. ?In 1997, the size of the majority was completely unexpected and in those first few days of May that year, a load of somewhat bewildered MPs turned up at Westminster that no one (least of all themselves) expected to win. As a result there were a good handful that the leadership hadn’t met or know what they were like or how loyal they would be to Blair - some weren’t. This time around, there has been more vetting, more central control which will make keeping party discipline - always a challenge with a big majority - that bit easier.?

?Starmer’s hard work has paid off. He went to Buckingham Palace this morning where King Charles asked him to a government. Once the door of 10 Downing Street has closed behind him and he was clapped in by staff, an honour bestowed on all Prime Ministers following an election,?he has begun announcing his Cabinet. This is not as straightforward as appointing this Shadow Cabinet to their Government roles – two of the few Labour casualties of last night were Thangam Debonnaire, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, who lost her Bristol seat to the Greens and Jonathan Ashworth,?Shadow Paymaster General lost in Leicester to an independent so there will need to be some rearranging. ?There will be briefings with civil servants, the finishing touches will be made to the King’s Speech scheduled for July 17. But he will be keen to demonstrate quickly that he wants to make change so expect at least one or two headline-grabbing policy announcements which don’t require legislation, like on planning, soon. He will, however, be likely to face an immediate obstacle to his other plans - money or more accurately, lack thereof. While Labour has been in discussions with civil servants since January (normal practice ahead of an election), it has not been able to look at the books. New Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, will be spending much of the coming days trying to understand what money there is. I suspect it will be rather less than the Conservative manifesto would have suggested. If this is the case she will have to consider her revenue raising options sooner rather than later, precipitating an early test for the new Government.?

?Starmer will have more than a domestic agenda to contend with. On July 9 he will travel to Washington DC to attend his first NATO summit as a global leader. Moreover, given the perilous state of some of his peers - ?President Macron in France who might find himself in a very uncomfortable co-habitation with the National Front come Sunday; ?Chancellor Scholz whose Social Democratic Party is now only the third most popular in German; and President Biden in the USA - Starmer will find himself as the politically stable Western leader.?

?As Starmer gets to grips with the premiership, what of the man who just vacated the post? ?Rishi Sunak has led the Conservative Party to one of the most humiliating of defeats, losing over 235 seats, to secure turning the party’s 80 seat majority in 2019 with not much more than 120 seats. It lost seats up and down the country including some of its very safest. Over 40 former ministers and whips including Gillian Keegan, Penny Mordant, Grant Shapps and Mark Harper; other names to be defeated include Jacob Rees Mogg and Liz Truss. When they come to do the post-mortem on Sunak it will be his abandonment of the D Day commemoration that will be seen to have been the fatal blow, party-gate and the betting scandal proving almost as lethal with public antipathy after 14 years of poor stewardship of the economy as exemplified by Lis Truss’ catastrophic budget of 2022, being a chronic condition underlying it all. The smart money has Sunak resigning both as PM but and an MP and fleeing to the US before the summer before the summer is out. ?

?The new Conservative leader must come from one of its 120-odd MPs, with Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly among the likely contenders. There will those in the centre of the party who will be trying to persuade Jeremy Hunt, outgoing Chancellor, who held on to his seat with a slender majority, to make a bid for leadership.

?Whoever emerges as leader of the Conservatives will have to deal with Reform UK, now with the added threat of an elected Nigel Farage. Yes, the good burghers of Clacton-on-Sea saw fit to send him to Westminster as their representative. One of the most striking aspects of the results is that in seat after seat Reform took more votes than the Conservatives, winning an estimated 14% of the national popular vote and won in four constituencies. The temptation for the Conservatives to respond to these results by lurching further to the right will be huge. I am not sure that that will help secure their future.

?Other than Labour the big winners in this election were the Liberal Democrats who had their best result ever. ?Ed Davey’s strategy of targeting seats where is believed it could have the most impact paid off, with the party set to win around 70 seats with around the same share of the national vote as 2019 when it took just 11 seats. They will reap the rewards of this increased representation in Westminster, with more places on influential Select Committees and more public funding as well as being able share portfolios among a greater number of colleagues. ?

?The other party to leverage FPTP successfully was the Greens which focussed resources on four seats and won all of them. ?

?It was a disastrous night for Scottish National Party which lost 38 seats, most to Labour, holding just nine constituencies.?Surely this will mean that issue of Scottish of independence will be shelved for a long time.

?That said it is likely that we will see the questions of the state of the Union to move to Northern Ireland where the nationalist Sinn Féin, which doesn’t actually take its seats in Westminster, became the largest party at the expense of the Democratic Unionist Part which lost three. ?

?In Wales, the Conservatives were routed, losing all 12 of its seats, nine to Labour which took a total of 27 seats in the principality, two to Plaid Cymru which doubled its Westminster total, and one to the Lib Dems which had not held a Welsh seat previously.

?This has been a landmark election. A new Labour government, a broken Conservative Party, a resurgent Liberal Democratic Party, Reform UK and the Greens strengthening their parliamentary presence, a changed political reality landscape in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and hundreds of new MPs of all colours. You know where I am if you would like help navigating this very changed political landscape.