This was an election campaign like no other. Less a battle of personalities and visions than of competing strategies to attain power, commanded not by the uninspiring monarchs under whose banners the battle was fought but the generals quietly ordering the troop movements far from the front lines. The upshot is the revolution we have before us: a strange and bathetic upheaval in British politics that is no less transformative for the manner of its birth. Last night’s extraordinary result brings to an end a period in our national life forever stained by the Conservative Party’s chaotic ineptitude, captured in its pathetically inglorious departure. “Into the valley of Death, rode the six hundred.” Indeed. Only this time without any of the honour.
In five years, the Tories have transferred their 80-seat majority to Keir Starmer’s Labour party and then let them double it. No government since the war has been rejected in such a manner. But even this doesn’t do justice to the upheaval. In 1997, the Tories seemed similarly broken, facing an opponent in Tony Blair far more adroit than Starmer. And yet, the party still emerged with 165 seats. In 2001, under the leadership of William Hague, it finished with 166. On both occasions the Tories retained swathes of England considered “safe” from which they could replenish their forces. Theresa May arrived in parliament in the landslide defeat of 1997. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson all followed in 2001. Today, much of that old Tory England lies in ruins, captured by the enemy which is now the national party of Britain, stretched far and wide — if not particularly deeply.
Overnight, the Conservative Party didn’t just lose Penny Mordaunt’s seat in Portsmouth and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s in Somerset, they lost Welwyn Hatfield, Chichester, Cheltenham and worse still: David Cameron’s old seat of Witney, Boris Johnson’s Henley, Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley and, perhaps most symbolically of all, Liz Truss’s in Norfolk. Accepting defeat, Rishi Sunak admitted the British people had delivered “a sobering verdict”. Sobering for the Conservatives perhaps. And it was one delivered with cold, calculated fury too, not some wild act of drunken abandon. This was calculated to hurt.
Meanwhile, a new band of cavaliers under the leadership of Nigel Farage has emerged on the scene, slicing through the grinding dullness of the campaign to claim a few small corners of England for itself — and a lot more votes — much as Ed Davey managed for the Liberal Democrats. Despite Davey’s startling success, at least in the number of seats he managed to win from an overall vote share of just 12%, Farage remains the personality who imposed his will on the race, a cavalry showman whose rearguard raids on the Tory backlines helped secure him the parliamentary breakthrough he has craved for so long — and just in time to lead the peasant’s revolt he has been building for decades. The reality this morning is that few people now doubt him when he warns that the result is “just the first step of something which is going to stun all of you”. As recently as 2017, Marine Le Pen’s National Front had just two MPs. Today, she stands on the brink of power, the Gaullist Republicans little more than a shell. For Keir Starmer, a warning — as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron can attest: revolutions have a habit of eating their own.
This in many ways is the most curious of election results. Labour has won a landslide with 34% of the vote — this is less than Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005, David Cameron in 2010 and 2015, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, and Boris Johnson in 2019. Two factors of huge significance secured Labour its landslide. First, the collapse of the Tory vote to just 24% — far less than Jeremy Corbyn in the last election, Gordon Brown in 2010 and even Michael Foot in 1983; a historic rejection of the government. And second, the extraordinary performance of Reform, which won 14% of the vote, but only four MPs — more votes than the Lib Dems for far fewer MPs. Today, however, Farage’s massed forces lie in second places across swathes of England — the new natural opposition to Labour. As Farage was right to point out, this may well prove to be one of the dominating facts in British politics over the next five years. Can you really imagine Labour daring to get too close to the EU given this new vulnerability? Farage may only have three colleagues with him in parliament, but his influence in British politics is about to explode.
Dig a little deeper into the result and there were disconcerting signs for Labour: Jeremy Corbyn winning in Islington, the expelled Faiza Shaheen denying the party another seat in Chingford, Jonathan Ashworth losing in Leicester and Wes Streeting coming close to losing his in Ilford. Yet, overall, such footnotes are just that — footnotes. The victory is Labour’s.
Over the past six weeks, I have travelled across the country speaking to ministers, candidates, party insiders and the campaign generals on both sides to understand what was happening and why, peering deep inside the bellies of both party machines. During this time, I saw a contrast of startling intensity: between one party ruthlessly committed to victory and another which had long ago lost the discipline necessary to govern and therefore even to command the respect of the country.
For Labour, the machine was manned by those entirely focused on one thing: power. These were the men and women who began 2021 on the sodden, boggy land of unpopularity only to suddenly discover their route to higher ground had been cleared by the grotesque incompetence of a Tory party. In contrast, I saw a governing party bewildered by the predicament in which it had found itself, lost to the point that it was unaware of why it was losing so badly; a desperate party playing a desperate hand and failing with every gamble it made, led by a prime minister who managed to be even more arrogant about his political ability than his predecessors. For four general elections in a row, Britain had voted for the Tories to stop something else: Gordon Brown “bankrupting Britain”, Ed Miliband being in the pocket of Alex Salmond, Jeremy Corbyn blocking Brexit. As soon as the Tories stood no chance of defeating anyone or anything, voters deserted them in their droves, their raison d’être having disappeared.
The campaign we have just witnessed was ultimately a battle between a party that was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to attain power, and another which had long ago given up the organising discipline to retain it. It was a campaign launched out of desperation by a prime minister who seemed so disoriented by his own failures in government that he was unable to see the folly of his reckless gamble. Much of the result, then, has to be on Sunak, a man who proved incapable of the task in front of him. But not all of it. The truth is, Sunak inherited a Conservative Party that long ago lost the will for power, and has been shattered as a result.
The day after the election five years ago, Boris Johnson travelled to Sedgefield to declare himself the Lord Servant of the North. Rishi Sunak travels to Buckingham Palace today having lost not only the North, but most of the rest of the country with it. The Tories were once the national party: the party of England and the Union, town and shire. Today, they are a party of national rejection.
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The Tory calamity is epitomised in the manner of its departure. The Labour Party knew the campaign had begun six hours before Sunak called it at 6pm on 22 May. The previous day, McSweeney had received a text message from a friend who monitors the betting markets and had noticed a flurry of activity from people placing money on a 4 July election. By the time McSweeney arrived in Parliament the next day and bumped into Starmer preparing for Prime Minister’s Questions, speculation was rife that Sunak was about to make his move. But McSweeney felt the sheer volume of bets was enough evidence to begin preparation. When he got back to Labour HQ at around midday, he authorised Labour’s head of digital, Tom Lillywhite, to start buying digital advertising space on YouTube and elsewhere, while also giving the go-ahead to staff to order the party’s “Change” logo to go on the lectern Starmer would speak from later on. As one senior figure put it to me, it never occurred to them that they might try to make some money from the information they had. The Tory rot was already evident.
McSweeney and his closest team had planned the first day of the campaign repeatedly over the previous few months, acutely aware that the most value he could bring was at the beginning. This head start, then, was doubly significant. For Isaac Levido, the battle-hardened campaign veteran entrusted by Sunak with the Tory campaign, the opposite was true. Not only had he lost the element of surprise, he did not know that this was the case, his trust broken by those who had lost their heads. More importantly, Levido was also being asked to fight a campaign from a position he had advised against.
Levido, who had already played a prominent role in the previous three elections, knew that the main benefit of incumbency lies in the ability to call the election at a time of your choosing — and on your terms. Given this, Levido had advised the Prime Minister to wait until the Autumn, arguing that the party’s best — and perhaps only — chance lay in going long. As inflation fell, so the argument went, so too would interest rates, helping to create an environment in which people might, just might, start to feel better about the country’s prospects. In a game where vibes and emotion are as important as facts, waiting was simply the sensible thing to do.
Yet robbed of his strongest message, Sunak had to deliver a different one in the pouring rain outside No. 10. “It might still be hard when you look at your bank balance, but this hard-earned economic stability was only ever meant to be the beginning.” It is hardly the best pitch for re-election. No longer “the plan has worked, don’t risk it” but “the plan will work — trust me”.
Ever since Sunak became prime minister, Levido had been urging the party to stick to its core message to voters: that it had a plan and it was working. Sunak had launched it on 4 January, 2023, just a few months after taking office, setting out five pledges that could be repeated in 13 words: “Halve inflation; grow the economy; reduce debt; cut waiting lists; stop the boats.” Levido had worked with Lynton Crosby in January 2014, when David Cameron had similarly sought to frame the next election with more than a year to go, unveiling his “long-term economic plan”. But after the calamities of Johnson and Truss, voters would no longer accept another slogan, Levido argued. They needed commitments they could be held to. And so the five pledges were born.
The problem for Sunak was twofold. The first was that the party was no longer disciplined enough to rally around this message — or even appeared capable of delivering it. At a Tory “away day” last year, MPs complained to Levido that they could not be expected to remember all the pledges. Levido was left exasperated.
The bigger problem, however, was that Sunak could not actually deliver on them, falling on all but the first two. And the longer he waited, the worse it got. Not only was he failing to get a grip on the NHS and the small boats crisis, but the country’s prisons were falling over, the flights to Rwanda were unlikely to go anywhere, the junior doctors continued striking and, most alarmingly, the Conservative parliamentary party could simply not be counted on to maintain its discipline over the summer. Sunak had lost faith in his ability to govern.
It was in the face of such failure — and his loss of faith that he could do anything about it — that Sunak faced a choice between a slow death or a suicidal charge. Ignoring Levido’s advice, he chose the latter.
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Ordered to lead the party into battle, Levido devised a strategy which would open with a blitz of campaign promises targeting potential Reform voters. This would force people to choose between Labour and the Conservatives in a straight fight. From here, Levido hoped the race would tighten and then the party would move to its central message: “Risk, risk, risk.” This, Levido believed, was the best the Tories had available. Denied the “stability” message that going long would have allowed, he was forced to pivot to a beware-Labour “security” message.
While Levido and his team expected a rocky first few days, as MPs raged against the Prime Minister’s recklessness, they did not expect to have to endure an succession of gaffes — Sunak asking a group of Welsh publicans whether they were looking forward to the European championships they had not qualified for; or appearing at the Titanic quarter in Belfast as his own campaign seemed to be sinking. Despite these, the plan showed some tentative signs of life. The announcements promising compulsory national service and a new “quadruple lock” for pensioners successfully differentiated the party from Labour. Tory internal polling showed the party’s favorability ratings starting to pick up. It helped that MPs were no longer at each other’s throats, while Labour was having to deal with a series of candidate selection headaches.
But, then, two catastrophes. First, Nigel Farage announced he was taking over as leader of Reform and contesting the seat in Clacton. And then Sunak went to Normandy and, inexplicably, left before the D-Day commemorations had finished. Back in London, the most senior campaign officials suddenly realised with horror that the leaders of France, Germany and the United States were all there on the beach together — alongside David Cameron, not Sunak. “What the fuck is this?” shouted one senior Tory, looking up at the TV screens. Levido advised the Prime Minister that the only option was to apologise, cauterise the wound and move on, but no-one was under any illusion about how bad it was for the campaign. Any hopes of an early poll tightening vanished.
McSweeney, however, believed Sunak’s campaign strategy was always doomed: he maintained it simply was not possible to appeal to Reform voters in this way without making the Tory campaign seem marginal to everyone else. Sunak’s cardinal sin, in McSweeney’s view, was his failure to deal with his Reform problem earlier: he could have tacked Right to crush the party; or he could have defined himself as a strong centrist by publicly taking on the recalcitrant MPs who had supported Liz Truss or were flirting with Farage. By doing neither, Sunak was fatally exposed.
Worse, his party looked out of touch. Why talk about national service to people who were drowning under the expense of their food, energy and childcare bills? They could only afford to make such specific pledges once they had established a strong campaign message, which they were unable to do. “They needed to get the plane off the ground first,” one senior Labour figure told me. But it wasn’t just a case of the policies being counterproductive; in McSweeney’s view, the very fact that Sunak suddenly tried to catch everyone off-guard with his election gamble also reinforced the narrative of Tory chaos.
Privately, I understand Levido is frustrated that his strategy for the start of the election was not successful. It failed, he believes, because, ultimately, voters had just stopped listening to the Tories. They were done. But starting 20 points behind in the polls did demand a riskier strategy than the one available to Labour. Levido was right to believe that closing the polls was the only way he could change the campaign narrative. Indeed, the reality is that from the moment Sunak called the election, the Tory campaign was not about winning, but stemming the scale of the defeat. Still, by mid-June there was still hope within the party that the Conservatives could finish with more than 200 MPs. It finished today relieved that it was the main party of opposition. Unless it gets its house in order quickly it won’t be so lucky next time. Remarkably, this defeat is both a punishment and an act of clementia. There is now an executioner’s blade hanging over the Tory Party.
Where McSweeney and Levido ultimately agree is the fact that much of the Tory problem — and Labour’s success — is because of decisions taken long before the election was called. Today’s Tory failure was baked in long before Sunak stood in the rain outside Downing Street and sealed his fate.
Indeed, those who know both McSweeney and Levido are struck by how similar they are as operators — quiet, softly spoken and no-nonsense. Sunak and Starmer are also remarkably similar in the tasks presented to them as leaders. Both had come into parties which had shown themselves unfit to govern. And both tried, at first, to hold their parties together, rather than take on those who had brought the party to the brink of ruin.
At first, in truth, Starmer and McSweeney had been quite concerned about Sunak. He was young, energetic and seemingly capable in the Covid era. But, then, he showed his essential weakness. In McSweeney’s view, Johnson’s great success in 2019 was persuading voters he was serious about change by purging the MPs standing in his way — including his own brother. Sunak convinced himself he didn’t need to do this or perhaps that he couldn’t. For McSweeney this was his original sin. As one Labour official put it: “He had a tiger at his front door and he had to go out and either shoot it or try to bring it into the house to domesticate it. He did neither and ended up being chased out of his back door.” By 2022, the options for displaying strength were extreme: expel Truss; condemn Johnson; launch a war against Farage. As the unelected head of a divided party, such options were not available to him. Nor was the opposite: inviting Farage to become a Tory. The task of weighing up such options now falls to the next Tory leader whoever that may be.
Those who have worked with both Sunak and Johnson tell me that the fundamental difference between the pair was one of “animal instinct”. Sunak was serious, decent and good to work for, driven by an optimistic conviction that had stood him well throughout his life: because he is usually smarter than everybody else in the room, he only needed to work harder than everybody else to win. Johnson, meanwhile, appreciated that politics was far more mediaeval: a game of power and theatre in which displays of authority mattered. It was Starmer, though, who learned Johnson’s lesson, not Sunak. And he is unlikely to now repeat Johnson’s mistakes in government, though may quickly find he is just as unpopular for a host of other reasons.
If there were ever any tigers at Starmer’s door, few now doubt McSweeney would have shot them. He knew that the very fact Labour had put forward Jeremy Corbyn for leader risked disqualifying the entire party in the eyes of voters. Given Starmer had served under Corbyn for almost all of his time in government, this was potentially deadly in a campaign. Yet, McSweeney and Starmer moved to deal with this weakness by not only sidelining Corbyn but expelling him from the parliamentary party and stopping him from standing for Labour. McSweeney and those close to him maintain this was a prerequisite of today’s result. He also moved to exile Labour’s Corbynite leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard. Without this other act of ruthlessness, today’s crushing defeat of the SNP would have been impossible, McSweeney believes. The man from Cork who saved the Union — it is some story.
Even after the campaign began, Starmer’s top team showed a ruthlessness in their insistence that any Labour candidate who risked causing them trouble in the future would not be allowed to stand. This has cost them in Islington and Chingford, but it will be seen as a price worth paying. Starmer’s missteps on Gaza — principally that LBC interview — were just as costly. Where this Muslim rage at Labour now goes is another current in British politics which could yet build into something important. But it wasn’t only the decision to rid Labour of its troublesome priests of the Left which showed McSweeney’s ruthlessness. Before the campaign, both he and Starmer’s campaign coordinator Pat McFadden — now nailed on to be one of the very biggest beasts in the incoming government — had also moved to shut down every potential weakness imaginable, not only with Corbyn but on tax, spending, the green energy transition, Brexit, immigration and gender. The party war-gamed all the different campaigns the Tories might try to fight, including the one they eventually did: tax. None of the leading figures strayed from that message. Even the trade unions, unhappy with Labour’s general direction, played their part. Here was a movement determined to seize their moment, the lure of power proving as much of a disciplining force as the weariness of power has proved disabling for the Conservatives.
Brexit will of course remain the defining legacy of the Conservative era. This was a government elected to Get Brexit Done and did so, no matter how dishonourably. Yet the Brexit they delivered is now deeply unpopular, neither close enough to the EU to have avoided the inevitable friction of withdrawal, nor distinctive enough to have proved to voters there was much good gained from all the pain. More importantly, it does not feel like it has worked for many voters whose grievances were not really about the EU so much as the powerlessness they felt over their own government. The twin issues of immigration and the European Court of Human Rights will now step into the hole once filled by the EU, the fuel which will turbocharge Farage’s new army. The irony now is that the challenge of Making Brexit Work now falls to Starmer, the man who tried to stop it. What he does with it is now up to him. The party of England has lost control of its own revolution. In Richard II, John of Gaunt lies dying, lamenting the rule of his King: “That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” We can say the same of the Conservative Party.
And as it dies, there is little to be gained for the Conservatives, nor the Liberal Democrats or Reform, in claiming Keir Starmer does not have a mandate for revolution because he only won 34% of the vote. They handed him the keys to No 10. In raw power terms, his achievement is more impressive than Clement Attlee’s, Harold Wilson’s or even Tony Blair’s, having required a swing of 1997 proportions simply to become the government. Instead, he turned the biggest Tory majority since 1987 into the biggest Labour majority since 2001. He is now our Puritanical Lord Protector, master of Parliament. With Sue Grey running Whitehall, Starmer controls Westminster in a way Boris Johnson never could. The machine is his.
As Labour leader, Starmer has shown two principal traits, discipline and ruthlessness, which has not been in evidence on the Conservative side since before the last election. Yes, Starmer is now bound by a manifesto of such rigid discipline it will make his life harder in government: he will be forced to manage the same creaking infrastructure, funded by the same creaking economy. But if he is anywhere near as ruthless in the application of power as he was in his pursuit of it, the manifesto won’t bind him for long.
The scale of his victory is so unique that in some ways it is harder to predict where the challenges to his authority will emerge — from within his cabinet, perhaps? Or from Farage’s new band of Reformers? Maybe even, somehow, from the bloodied corpse of the Conservative Party. All we do know is that the challenges will come. McSweeney and others were sanguine about the danger posed by Reform during this election, correctly calculating that the party damaged the Tories far more than Labour, but they are already conscious of the danger Farage will soon pose in swathes of small-town England which voted Labour this year but left Reform in second place. It is also the case that while Labour has shown discipline on issues where it is not comfortable, it remains vulnerable to any serious political party on the politics of gender, immigration and culture issues in particular.
However disciplined the Labour party has been over the past few years, the moral of this story is ultimately one of crime and punishment; a governing party driven mad by its failures of character, like Raskolnikov, unable to control itself, unable to govern and ultimately, at the death, unable even to think straight and maintain its dignity. The party has been sent into exile, not quite dead, but broken. It will take a long time to live down the dishonour of its defeat. “Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,” John of Gaunt declares, hopefully. No such luck for Sunak, Truss, Johnson and the Conservative Party.
For today is Keir Starmer’s day. And Morgan McSweeney’s. Politics is the pursuit of power and they pursued it better than anyone else. Now they must now wield it. Becoming King is no guarantee of safety after all. Just ask Richard II.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/