KEIR We Go! Keir We Go! Keir We –
Or maybe not. In a smart council building tucked behind King’s Cross, the mood was jubilant but very far from triumphalist as the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras declared the result.
Sir Keir Starmer, the sitting MP, and our new Prime Minister, held his seat. But at 3am, hours before the final results were in, there was no grandstanding. In fact, there was no reference to the historic Labour landslide over which he had just presided.
Instead of victory he emphasised it was “time to deliver” and pledged:
“I promise this: whether you voted for me or not, I will serve every person in this constituency.”
While Starmer the barrister enjoyed a high flying legal career, Starmer the politician has always come across as awkward, stiff and strangely hesitant. Adenoidal and earnest, his hand rises and drops like a Thunderbirds puppet. But hey, still more relatable than Sunak.
By dawn he was presiding over flag waving party members and revelling in the dramatically altered fortunes of his party. In the early hours of Friday, however, we saw a very different man to the one we expected.
Wearing a smart suit, box fresh shirt and red tie, he smiled – all the way to his eyes.
On course to become the next leader of a country in a cost of living crisis, he counter-intuitively looked more relaxed, more at ease than we have ever seen him before.
He was accompanied by his wife, Victoria, who has punctiliously avoided the stump.
Dressed in a chic three-quarter sleeved jacket and fashionable wide-legged navy trousers, she discreetly left the hall before the result was announced; how she will feel about the next five years’ media glare remains to be seen.
But even as Britain celebrated the Tories’ resounding defeat, the impression persists that the country doesn’t quite know who, exactly, it has voted for.
In the run up to the election, The New Yorker mooted that Starmer’s policies were the product of carefully calibrated political triangulation. Here on his home turf, we just thought he was square.
Truthfully, we’re none the wiser about the man who adopted an ultra-cautious ‘Ming Vase’ campaign strategy, predicated on the notion that the precious trophy is already in your grasp: all you have to do is not trip over your own feet.
Thrilling, no. Effective, yes. The people have spoken. Actually for weeks now they’ve been blowing the gaff to any random pollster who asked, that they would be voting Labour. Or Reform. Or even the Pick me! Pick me! Look, I can paddle board really badly too! Lib Dems.
Ultimately, the decision was easy as ABC. Anything But Conservative. And throughout the night, the blue wall turned red, Sir Ed Davey’s total wipeout antics proved to be a winner and Reform UK staked its claim as a political force offering a home to disgruntled Tory voters, despite an absence of any actual policies.
It was a bloodbath; Big Beasts like defence minister Grant Shapps and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Middling Beasts such as education secretary Gillian Keegan and of course Mini Beasts like – oh look, Rishi Sunak kept his seat, if not his berth at Number 10.
“Politics is at a “crossroads” said a visibly shaken Sir Robert Buckland, former justice minister, who lost his seat. The Conservative Party, he added, must make the “right choice” if it is to inspire a new generation. “I think that we have seen in this election an astonishing ill-discipline within the party,” he said in his farewell speech.
“Democracy is never wrong,” said eminently dignified Leader of the Commons Penny Mordant who also lost her Portsmouth North to Labour.
She ought to try telling that to her Conservative colleagues who had forgotten the public anger over partygate, the 49-day economic clusterf**ck of Liz Truss and Sunak’s shameful D-Day desertion and were rather put out to discover the Great British Public hadn’t.
And so they found themselves on the nation’s doorsteps enquiring whether they could rely on householders’ votes only for said householders to insist on banging on about potholes on the roads, poo in the water, the dearth of GP appointments and complete absence of social care.
Running through the Tory campaign was a shocking disconnect between reality and politics.
Earlier in the week party grandees seemed genuinely astonished that after 14 years and five prime ministers we just weren’t that into them. They were damned if they were going to go with dignity.
Instead, they fulminated and fear mongered like jealous exes, hurling insults and reproach. Interviewed on the BBC in the wee small hours, Jacob Rees-Mogg mournfully observed with breathtaking hindsight that his party faced defeat because “they took their core supporters for granted”.
He was wide of the mark. What they did was far worse; they set about gaslighting every voter in the country, variously casting us as insane for “creating a supermajority” and decrying us as idiot architects of our own misfortune for daring to desert them.
A vote for Reform would cause irrevocable damage, we were warned. Labour, meanwhile, would bankrupt generations, imperil Brexit, leave the nation vulnerable on the world stage due to inadequate defence investment and clobber the country with a double death tax.
Yet all that still sounded better than the current lot. Why? Because after the multi-millionaire whose parents couldn’t afford Sky TV but could scrape together enough to send him to Winchester, it turned out the only man who could ever reach us was the son of a – tool maker.
Britain wanted the one thing Labour could give us. ABC: A Barnstarming Change. Whatever that looked like.
Sunak was gracious. He hung on to his seat, just, and demonstrated the sort of generosity towards his opponents – it was he who called the overall result and conceded long before the counting had finished – that has been vanishingly rare of late.
Can it only be six weeks ago that addressed the nation from Drowning Street, as the heavens rather presciently opened onto his head: “Now is the moment for Britain to choose its future,” he said.
Britain has chosen. It chose to definitively sweep away the Tories in a veritable tsunami. How they emerge from the wreckage will be a test of mettle and character; having lost the trust of the country they must earn the right to bellyache about Labour.
One party’s “insane” supermajority is another’s overwhelming mandate and much needed as Starmer’s main task now is to somehow find a way to unite the country or, to paraphrase D:Ream, things can only get bitter.
As for the Tories, once again it’s as simple as ABC: Absolute Bloody Carnage.
As the removal vans trundle up to Number 10 and former cabinet ministers clear their desks, let the grisly post mortem commence…
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