Although The Washington Post has been troubled lately by internal dissension, it retains a number of indelible claims to fame. Among the smaller ones is that the Post, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was the first to use the phrase “landslide victory,” when the Republicans were routed by the Democrats in the 1890 midterm elections. “Both parties have in the past shouted over landslide victories,” the Post said, “and each party…has seen its landslide victory soon turned into overwhelming defeat.”
That applies to British politics with remarkable aptness. Three times in the last century the Conservative Party was swept aside by an electoral landslide. In 1906 the Tories were crushed by the Liberals and retained only 157 out of 670 parliamentary seats; in 1945, by which time Labour had replaced the Liberals as the Tories’ main opponent, they were reduced to 213 seats; and in 1997 they held only 165 seats against Labour’s 418.
On each occasion the Tories not only recovered but reestablished themselves as the dominant British political party in a century that, in its early years, had seemed destined to belong to the left. They were back in 1915 in a wartime coalition government and spent most of the next thirty years in office. They recovered from the debacle of 1945 to regain power in 1951 and held it for thirteen years. And after their rout in 1997, they were back in Downing Street by 2010.
This July the Tories suffered a defeat more comprehensive than any of those, indeed heavier than any they had known since the Reform Bill began to expand the franchise nearly two hundred years ago. They lost two thirds of their seats, ending up with no more than 121, while Labour almost doubled its seats from the last election with 412, a huge majority over all other parties. We saw indeed a “landslide victory soon turned into overwhelming defeat”: in December 2019 the Tories won their largest parliamentary majority in more than thirty years, only to suffer overwhelming defeat less than five years later. What happened?
A general election had to take place this year, and most people thought it would come in the autumn. Instead, on May 22 Rishi Sunak, the prime minister since October 2022, appeared outside 10 Downing Street to announce an election on July 4. It was an inauspicious occasion. He stood in pouring rain while some nearby joker audibly and unstoppably played “Things Can Only Get Better,” Labour’s campaign song before its 1997 landslide. If he heard it, Sunak must have felt more like Edgar in King Lear: “And worse I may be yet; the worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’”
So it proved. Someone in the Tory campaign office—a different kind of joker?—thought it would be a good idea for Sunak to travel to Northern Ireland two days later, although his Conservative Party doesn’t run candidates there, and to visit the shipyard where the Titanic was built, prompting fairly obvious jokes. Then it was one mishap after another, maybe the worst on June 6, when Sunak left the eightieth celebration of D-Day in Normandy early to do a campaign television interview, allowing his critics to say that he had insulted the few surviving veterans and the memory of those who died.
One of the better things about British general election campaigns used to be their brevity—little more than three weeks between the dissolution of Parliament and polling day. This year it was almost five weeks, for no good or obvious reason—unless the Tory leadership thought that it would improve their chances, in which case they were quite wrong. The huge lead that Labour had held in opinion polls for months continued until the election, although with a twist.
The Labour leader and new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is now claiming an unprecedented mandate, but he must know how tenuous that mandate really is. The most disturbing thing about the election was the low turnout, barely 60 percent. The British used to be enthusiastic voters: 84 percent of them cast ballots in 1950. Turnout fluctuated and declined slightly but remained well above 70 percent in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was overwhelmingly reelected twice, before falling to 71 percent in the 1997 election, the first victory of Tony Blair and “New Labour.”
Four years later it dropped to 59 percent, which might be thought Blair’s greatest political achievement. It wasn’t just that by 2001 voters were faced with a choice between William Hague, a Conservative who couldn’t win, and Blair, a conservative who could. The left never really understood Blair, seeing him as an infiltrator who had taken over Labour from the inside and moved it hard to the right. That was part of the truth, but not the central truth, which was that Blairism wasn’t ideologically left-wing or right-wing; it had no ideological content at all. Blair won his electoral victories by voiding politics of its content, taking the politics out of politics.
Advertisement
Even in 1997 the scale of the Labour landslide had certain technical explanations. For one thing the Tory vote collapsed, not least because a substantial number of the party’s supporters defected to Europhobic parties of the right, a new and ominous development. The Westminster electoral system (which is also the Capitol Hill system) of single legislators elected on a simple plurality in discrete districts always favors larger parties over smaller ones, as Condorcet recognized long ago, and Blair’s party took 63 percent of the seats with 43 percent of the popular vote.
Finally, in 1997 the British electorate discovered for the first time since the 1920s the art of tactical voting, which is the one way the Westminster system can be outwitted, as it were. That was demonstrated by the seemingly curious way that the Liberal Democrats increased their seats from twenty to forty-six with a smaller popular vote. The only explanation was that people weren’t so much voting for them as voting for the candidate, Labour or Lib Dem, most likely to defeat a Tory incumbent.
Just the same thing happened this year. In 2019 the Lib Dems scraped in with eleven seats. This July they won seventy-two, although their popular vote had barely changed as a percentage and their total number of votes was actually slightly smaller. This was simply a vote against the disastrous and discredited Tories, with dramatic consequences in what had been Conservative heartlands. Three of the five Tory prime ministers over the past fourteen years had voluntarily left Parliament, but the constituencies they once represented—Witney (David Cameron’s old seat), Henley (Boris Johnson’s), and Maidenhead (Theresa May’s)—all fell to the Lib Dems. Although Sunak held his seat in Yorkshire, the preposterous Liz Truss, whose calamitous forty-nine days in Downing Street at least guaranteed her a place in the record books for the shortest-ever premiership, lost her seat in Norfolk, so she can go back to promoting her risible book, Ten Years to Save the West. A large part of southern England and the West Country, including almost the entire county of Somerset, is now colored the Lib Dems’ yellow on an electoral map, while Labour again holds great swathes of the Midlands and the North.
Even so, Starmer should take note of warning signals. For months before the election, polls had given Labour something like a 20 percent lead over the Tories. In the event, the Tory vote fell from almost 14 million in 2019 to less than 7 million, but the Labour vote of 9.7 million was actually lower than in the 2019 election, when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour was heavily defeated. The distortion of votes and seats in 1997 was eclipsed this year: Labour won 63 percent of the seats with a mere 34 percent of the popular vote, the lowest figure ever for a victorious party, which given such a low turnout means that scarcely more than one enfranchised citizen in five cast a vote for Labour.
These quirks are explained not only by the voting system but by the demise of two-party politics. In the middle of the last century, with the decline and then the near death of the old Liberal Party, Labour and the Tories shared up to 97 percent of the popular vote. By 2010 that had fallen to 65 percent, and in this election to just over 57 percent. That was partly a consequence of the rise of nationalist parties in the Celtic fringe, although the Scottish National Party was routed by Labour in July, and with good reason.
Nobody dares say that devolution—creating subsidiary legislatures in that fringe—has been a disaster, although the truth stares us in the face. The first case of devolution was Northern Ireland in the half-century from 1921 to 1972, when it was ruled or misruled by the Ulster Unionist Party, and no one thinks that was a success. Since Scotland and Wales were granted their subsidiary governments a quarter-century ago, on every measure from health and education to economic growth they have fared less well than England, despite the large subventions they receive from the Treasury in Whitehall.
The election result this year was also partly explained by the eruption of the Europhobic or Brexotic right. After years of negligible support, Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 12.6 percent of the vote in the 2015 election, coming in second to Labour in scores of constituencies and offering another portent, generally ignored, of what would happen in the Brexit referendum the following year. After UKIP and Farage got what they wanted with the referendum, he left his old party for his next turn leading the new Brexit Party, agitating for the hardest severance of links with Europe. And now it has appeared again as Reform UK, which might be considered the British equivalent of the European parties of the hard right: the National Rally in France, Alternative for Germany, and others known by the unhelpful name of “populist”—“demagogic nativist” might be more accurate.
Advertisement
The British electoral system has often been criticized for its unfairness. If Labour got far more seats than its votes warranted in this election, and the Tories rather fewer than they deserved, then the Lib Dems got pretty much their just deserts, while the great loser was Reform UK: the Lib Dems got 12.2 percent of the vote and seventy-two seats; Reform UK got 14.3 percent and five seats. One of those was won by Farage, who has some claim to being the most influential British politician of the past generation and who stepped in and joined the election campaign just in time to become leader of Reform UK and its candidate for Clacton. Farage also found time to take part in a London fund-raiser for his friend Donald Trump and, on hearing the news of the attempted assassination on July 13, he said, “I’m flying to America to support Trump in this desperate hour.”
Another quite unforeseen development was the election of four independent MPs on a platform that one of them summed up in his victory speech: “This is for Gaza.” There are now four million Muslims in Great Britain, mostly descendants of immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh. We’ve flattered ourselves about the assimilation that has allowed London to have a Muslim mayor and Scotland a Muslim first minister, but only now do we find that we have a Muslim vote. In cities like Birmingham and Leicester, there are constituencies where Muslims are numerous enough to swing elections when they find a cause, as they have just done. Jonathan Ashworth had expected to be offered a cabinet position by Starmer, but he lost his seat in Leicester South to one of those pro-Palestinian independents, as did three other former Labour MPs.
There has been much talk of the loss of public trust in politicians and politics. A group of worthies has suggested remedies:
New systems for managing conflicts of interest and lobbying; improving regulation of post-government employment; ensuring appointments to the Lords are only made on merit and other public appointments are rigorous and transparent; and strengthening the independence of the honours system.1
Those are all very well, but such words do not mention many possible reasons for the sharp decline of trust.
That conflict at The Washington Post I mentioned earlier stems from the disapproval many on the paper’s staff feel for Will Lewis—Sir William, to give him the title conferred by Boris Johnson—who was recruited in November 2023 as its chief executive. This invasion of the American press by my compatriots is indeed a striking and curious phenomenon. As an English journalist myself I should perhaps be gratified by the way the great American republic says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be editors,” but it seems odd that there is no one among 330 million Americans apparently considered fit to be chief executive of the Post.
Lewis’s rap sheet goes back to his earlier career in Fleet Street. He was brought to News Corp by Rupert Murdoch in 2010 to clean up—or maybe cover up—the company’s phone-hacking scandal.2 But it’s also held against him that in 2009, before he worked for Murdoch, he had been in charge of The Daily Telegraph when it obtained a computer disk containing the details of MPs’ expense claims. The disk may have been purloined and was certainly bought for hard cash by the newspaper, violating American principles of journalistic ethics.
And yet, however the Telegraph got the disk, there could hardly have been a stronger public-interest defense for publishing such scandalous information. Legislators who had been passing laws to imprison poor people who had made trivially fraudulent welfare claims had also been filling their own pockets in simply grotesque fashion, demanding reimbursement for the cost of antique rugs or expensive televisions or, in the case of one Tory MP, the duck island in the lake in his garden.
The general repute of politicians has never quite recovered, whatever Starmer may think. He has brought back into his government two Labour politicians who were disgraced in that scandal: Douglas Alexander, who repaid the more than £12,000 that he had improperly claimed as expenses, and Jacqui Smith, who misused the (already dubious) second home allowance and also claimed the cost of pornographic films her husband had been watching. She is now being given a seat in the House of Lords along with her new position as higher education minister.
When we look back over recent years we recall one outrage after another: the parties held in Downing Street during lockdown when ordinary citizens were not allowed to visit their dying parents in the hospital, corruptly awarded contracts for medical equipment, shareholders taking billions in dividends from privatized water companies that pour excrement into our rivers and seas. After resigning as prime minister, David Cameron took a highly paid position with a financial services company called Greensill, then tried to lobby ministers on its behalf, before Sunak brought him back into government as foreign secretary. After all that, we were barely surprised to learn that several people close to Sunak had placed bets on the surprising choice of July for the date of the election.
Even those, squalid as they were, are dwarfed by worse outrages. The two most consequential decisions by the British government or the British people in this century, to invade Iraq and to leave the European Union, were both based on lies. In the case of Brexit, claims such as the one plastered over the side of a bus—“We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”—were mendacious, and leaving the EU has brought the country no benefits and many problems. That was nevertheless studiously ignored by both Tories and Labour during the election campaign, even though in some polls barely a third of voters now think Brexit a success, and nearly 60 percent say they regret it.
As for the Iraq War, in case anyone needs reminding, the Joint Intelligence Committee gave Tony Blair its assessment that the available evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was “sporadic and patchy” and “limited.” He thereupon told the House of Commons on September 24, 2002, that the intelligence on Saddam’s WMDs was “extensive, detailed and authoritative.” His henchman in waging the war of lies that preceded the actual war was Alastair Campbell, who was one of the television pundits on election night and is generally now treated as an oracle of political wisdom.
Three days after the election Blair offered unsolicited advice to Starmer in The Sunday Times under the headline “Get Tough on Crime and Don’t Fall Prey to Wokeism,” which could easily have appeared in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph in an article by one of their more stridently right-wing columnists. Is it surprising that respect for politics and trust in politicians has fallen so low?
One painful difference between 1997 and 2024 must weigh on the new government. That earlier election demonstrated, among other things, that “It’s the economy, stupid” is one of the stupidest political slogans ever coined. If it was the economy, then the Tories would have lost in 1992 when the country was in recession, and they would have won in 1997 when the economy was booming. A gradual and steady increase in economic growth was inherited by Labour in 1997 and continued until the crash of 2008, while the careful stewardship of Kenneth Clarke as the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer bequeathed his Labour successor, Gordon Brown, public finances in very healthy condition.
By contrast, the outlook today for Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor and the first woman to hold that office, is woeful. During the fourteen years the Tories have been in office, real GDP has grown by 11.5 percent, compared to an average of 18.6 percent for G-7 countries, and real earnings have risen by only 2.9 percent, less than a third of the G-7 average. National debt is the highest it has been since 1961, taxes are higher than they have been since 1945, and wages and productivity are stagnating. One of the more plausible ministers in the new cabinet is the health secretary, Wes Streeting, who rightly says that the National Health Service is broken, the same word Starmer uses for our prison service. There is an acute shortage of housing, for which the government can only hope to find a remedy, as indeed it can only hope for increased economic growth.
And what of the Tories? A defeat on this scale leaves them looking not only decrepit but futile, with some of their prized policies, such as the monstrous and fantastical plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, discarded before even being tried. A large number of Conservative MPs left Parliament of their own accord, but an impressive array of well-known names lost their seats in the election, including eleven former cabinet ministers, a record number. Quite a few of them were making plans for a life after politics well before the election. Kwasi Kwarteng was Liz Truss’s chancellor for a matter of weeks, during which he almost collapsed the economy. Since then he has been paid £62,600 for speaking engagements and media appearances, a mere foretaste of the future, and was also paid £35,000 in January for twenty hours of consultancy work for Fortescue Future Industries, a metal-mining and green energy company. Other Tories are lining up jobs in finance, where their names will be their chief asset. After all, why else did JPMorgan Chase agree to pay Blair a million dollars a year for a part-time advisory position the moment he left Downing Street?
For years the Tories have been spooked by Farage, and now that he is in Parliament they will be even more frightened. The Daily Telegraph, once the voice of staid and sensible conservatism, has been writing of him with awe, and one of its more hysterical columnists has written that “Nigel Farage is already the leader of the Conservatives.” He is being treated by the Conservatives with nervous respect, and some are already murmuring about an alliance between the Tories and his Reform UK, which would be disastrous. One of the reasons for the Tories’ astonishing success over more than 150 years has been their capacity for absorbing other political fractions: the Liberal Unionists in the 1880s, the Coalition Liberals in the 1920s, the National Liberals in the 1930s. A merger with Farage’s party would be a reverse takeover, in which the Tories themselves would be devoured, like the man in the limerick who went for a ride on a tiger and nothing was left of him except the smile on the face of the tiger—a smile Farage would wear very happily.
All this might sound gloomy or sarcastic. And yet, whatever its outcome, there’s something to be said for a British general election: quiet, almost placid, and with certainly no need for 30,000 police to be deployed against the threat of disorder, as they apparently were during the nearly contemporaneous French election. The debate between Sunak and Starmer may not have been very gripping, but better two dullards than two dotards; better two intelligent, competent, middle-aged men treating each other with a modicum of respect than the choice that, as I write, faces American voters this autumn, between a mendacious, felonious, lecherous lout and a man plainly on the verge of senility. (Bedraggled as they are, the Tories could give the Democrats lessons in getting rid of leaders who have outstayed their welcome.)
And nothing became Sunak like his departure. On the morning after the election he gave a gracious speech in Downing Street, saying that “Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all our successes, and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man,” civility reciprocated by Starmer. Then Sunak went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the king, followed by Starmer, to whom the king said with a smile, “You must be exhausted,” before inviting him to form a government. And it was over, a simple, well-conducted, and unchallenged transfer of power before lunch.
“One of the most remarkable things about Britain,” Sunak also said,
is just how unremarkable it is that two generations after my grandparents came here with little, I could become prime minister. And that I could watch my two young daughters light Diwali candles on the steps in Downing Street. We must hold true to that idea of who we are. That vision of kindness, decency, and tolerance that has always been the British way.
There is an element of exaggeration or self-flattery in that, but it’s not entirely wrong. Things might get better, but worse we could be yet.
—July 17, 2024
