Don’t allow the predictability to underwhelm you. Sir Keir Starmer has led Labour to a monumental victory, upending the UK’s political landscape as voters delivered a punishment beating to the Conservatives. British politics is about to change utterly.
It is a measure of how far the Conservative party has fallen that the predicted 131 seats will almost have felt like a relief. After six excruciating weeks, the worst defeat in its history came in at the higher end of expectations.
The inquests will be brutal but the explanation is devastatingly simple and has little to do with Rishi Sunak’s hopeless campaign. The public responded with disgust and contempt towards a government they associated with incompetence and chaos. Whether the issue was tax, public services or immigration, the party was judged to have failed them.
Starmer will now be the nation’s dominant political figure. Furthermore, if the exit polls are right, Labour’s landslide will also have shored up the Union by reducing the Scottish National party to a rump in Westminster.
In the campaign, the Labour leader painted his agenda as long-term, talking often of a “decade of renewal”. But the nature of his victory should serve as a warning that he may not enjoy the stability that prime ministers can usually expect after a landslide win and that he may not have that long to show real progress.
This is not to take away from his achievement in returning Labour to electability. The party’s turnaround has been remarkable. But Labour’s share of the vote would not normally deliver a landslide. The scale of his win owes much to a huge split on the right and, most of all, to the desire to be rid of the outgoing Conservative government.
Yet what will — or should — worry Labour is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which looks set to get a toehold in parliament. More significant is the large number of seats where Reform is likely to be in second place and where, next time, it will be the main challenger to sitting Labour MPs.
This could materially change the nature of the Labour government because there will suddenly be many Labour MPs looking at the threat from the nationalist right in an era where voters are consistently more volatile. This may well check some progressive instincts — a more liberal approach to prisoner releases for example — but it also means Starmer cannot take his decade for granted. He will feel the pressure to move faster to deliver the change, especially on the NHS and public services, that he has loudly but unspecifically promised.
But while the threat to Labour is long-term, Reform’s vote share poses an immediate existential crisis for the Tories. And Farage will be emboldened to replace, rather than seek a pact with, the Tories.
The Conservatives must decide whether to try to move to reunify the right vote, marginalising Reform by stealing their policies, or whether they have simply been punished for their failings in office and can reclaim support by staying in the centre-right and rebuilding trust as Labour loses popularity. The unfortunate truth for whoever emerges as the next Tory leader is that they need to do both.
But that is for the future. For the first time in more than a decade, the UK has a stable, centre-left government led by an understated but patently serious premier. After the chaos of recent years, it may take some time for everyone to adjust.
