Fourteen Years
That’s two whole mirrors’ worth of misfortune. Enough.
Thursday pm.
Here we are. Writing about the aftermath of an election.
In 2019 I was otherwise occupied for a whole bunch of reasons, both work and personal, but I did at least get out to vote. Not that it made any difference where I was; the God-awful candidate who was the Conservative incumbent increased his majority. Nationally, the result was too depressing to contemplate. And then things got worse.
In 2017, like absolutely everyone else, I had no clue what had just happened, but I was actually quite pleased that it had, overall. Sadly, we didn’t quite realise quite the level of paralysis and chaos that was about to be unleashed. May was eventually (metaphorically speaking) shown into the room with the empty desk and whisky bottle, handed the revolver and advised to do the decent thing¹, but that only unleashed greater, Johnson-shaped horrors.
In 2015 I didn’t talk about the result either, just about how the dish-faced dullard, Cameron suddenly thought all this debating stuff was beneath him now he actually had to defend his terrible record in office. Perhaps I really didn’t want to think about just how depressing that campaign had been.
But in 2010, oh so long ago now, it feels, I did write about what had just happened. The dust hadn’t settled and the horse trading that would lead to the coalition had yet to be completed. How could any of us have known what a disastrous set of circumstances would unfold in the years that followed?
Fourteen years of misfortune. Two whole mirrors’ worth.
But, as I said, here we are.
Most of the talk has rightly been about how awful the incumbent government have been, and how feeble and useless its leader and his team are. Some of the talk, though, has been about “how liitle enthusiasm there is for Labour”. Fine. But let’s take one thing at a time. Enthusiasm is one thing, but a minimum need for some kind of empathy and competence comes first. The single most important thing is to get rid of the malignant phage that has eaten away at the institutions and mechanisms of this country for nearly a decade and a half. If you’re going to turn a huge lumbering beast around, you need to start somewhere. It will take some time, because huge lumbering beasts are, well, huge, and lumbering, and therefore not much of a fan of changing direction in a hurry.
To be honest, the exit poll has provoked very mixed feelings. There’s the relief of a seemingly whacking majority for Labour, and the self-inflicted kicking the Tories deserved. But there were thirteen seats there for Reform. That was thirteen too many as far as I’m concerned, but you wonder exactly what discipline a handful of Reform MPs surrounding Farage can manage for a whole Parliament. The first result of the evening in Sunderland was an early sign that they are eating into the Tory vote in a big way, but that’s still a worry. And the sad-faced puffin in human form that is Andrea Leadsom was proclaiming that the reason they were looking to be getting a kicking was that they were not batshit mentalist enough. You just know that the civil war is ready to brew up, and at any moment.
But at around 0130 it has to be said, the TV coverage is beyond awful. Kuennsberg on BBC, Osborne on ITV, and a parade of utter horrors on 4. All of them are pretty much unwatchable. I managed to dwell at Radio 4 for a moment, and just happened to catch the joyful moment of an interview with Count Binface at the Ripon count, very artfully. But for the night, I’m giving up. It can wait until the morning.
Friday am
Things always look slightly different in the morning. The exit polls got some things right, some things wrong. Reform’s share of the vote is startling, but the seat count (and indeed the seat cunt) was overestimated. They only have the same number of seats as the Greens, or Plaid Cymru. That’s some consolation. So is seeing the back of Rees-Mogg, and especially Liz Truss, who was (as you might expect) utterly batshit. Two proper “Portillo” moments in one night. The big takeaway from all this is everyone really, really fucking hated the Conservatives, and wanted them gone. Thier worst defeat ever. Job done. But the other lesson was that voters were tactical, and party loyalties are loosening in ways they don’t seem to have done for a very long time. Some switched to Labour, some switched to the LibDems. Some voted Reform. Some voted for independents — more than ever, in fact. John Curtice rightly pointed out that the events of last night have their roots in two places: Johnson and Partygate, and Truss’s disastrous financial event. The public revulsion at first the moral vacuum, then the intellectual vacuum that followed were the triggers. The polls moved decisively against the Tories then, and never recovered.
More supposedly moderate voices in what’s left of the Tories were counselling that looking over to Reform, and thinking they needed to go there was seductive, but not a real solution. They have to work out what kind of party they need to be now, and who they need to appeal to. But listening the likes of Steve Baker (who was spouting word soup about the EU and his endless need to justify his role in the self-kneecapping of Brexit), Liz Truss (sounding frankly like she’d been medicated, banging on about the Human Rights Act, and low taxation), and Suella Braverman (who was just being, you know, Suella Braverman), you do begin to wonder what’s next. If you add in the ever reliably batshit Leadsom last night you can see the initial rumblings of a very nasty civil war in what’s left of their Commons footprint. You’d say there will a battle for the soul of the party, if you could be at all sure it even has one any longer. Perhaps that’s part of the problem: the electorate looked at them and saw what they’ve become. For voters on the right of the Tory base, there weren’t many other places to go apart from Reform, so they mopped those votes up. For now, though, none of this really matters, because they’re in Opposition. The real point is government continues, and the transition is already happening, right now. In a couple of hours, Keir Starmer will stand outside Downing Street, having just been asked to form a government by the King. He’ll announce his Cabinet appointments, and the work of government will go on. They will have the reins. It’s not triumphal, it’s not gloating, but it’s a relief. For now, that is at least something.
¹ Or, for the squeamish among us, “sent away to live on a lovely farm”. Presumably with corn fields aplenty.
