It was a brilliant summer’s day, all the polls were pointing to a huge Labour victory, perhaps the biggest majority in history. But the faces at the polling station were grim. People were voting for Labour, but with a heavy heart and, sometimes, anger.
They knew it had to be done. They knew they could vanquish the Tories. But as one Sky commentator called it, this was a “loveless landslide”. The day before, Sir Keir had blithely tossed aside the aspirations of millions of his supporters and agreed that Britain will never join the EU again in his lifetime.
Where was the party’s moral crusade, their passion for putting things right after the long 14 years? The day before, John Curtice had explained in exasperation what research shows the public wants, and it was smugly ignored by both Labour and Tory politicians. Labour would have none of it. Caution would rule, even after an election victory.
So your diarist joined friends for dinner, prepared for a Labour landslide, but uneasy at a few last minute gossipy concerns.
Avoiding a semi-barbarous custom
Parmesan soup, slow roasted garlicky lamb and strawberry meringue. Our hostess followed the advice of Miss Manners: “While it is sometimes expedient to require one’s guests to eat from plates balanced on their laps (the semi-barbarous custom known as the buffet dinner), expecting them to do so in the dark shows lack of consideration for both your guests and the rug. Miss Manners suggests confining this practice to dessert, and confining dessert to a food that is as tasty when picked up off the floor as it is from a plate. Apples, rather than zabaglione, for example.”
Then it was 10pm and the exit poll showed a Labour landslide. Reaction round the table was muted. We traipsed into the sitting room to watch events unfold on the BBC, but of course, the BBC has been taken over by vulgarians. Whilst talking of the dignity of the democratic process, as our host remarked, the presentation was more reminiscent of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Surreptitious attempts to make stink bombs
Its success depended on whether the viewer was swept up in what no doubt the BBC producers would claim was the “chemistry” between Laura Kuenssberg, Adam Fleming, Chris Mason and Clive Myrie. If that chemistry was more reminiscent of surreptitious 5th form attempts to make stink bombs, however, the presentation became an embarrassment.
Our party was flat. Labour apparently had a majority of nearly 200, according to the exit poll, yet after all there seemed little joy for East Anglia.
11:10pm. Labour won Sunderland South handsomely, but Reform won twice the number of votes as the Tories. Gasps from the armchair audience. “Working class fascists,” somebody grumbled. “Or ‘our people’, as Labour would call them,” somebody else added.
‘You’ve got a big one there!‘
11:30. A woman turned up on stage wearing an elaborate hat which looked as though swans were nesting in it. The returning officer, apparently, who delivered the result as though opening a flower show.
Andrea Leadsom declared she knew what ‘the people’ wanted, because she had just come to the studio from a pub in Silverstone, full of petrol heads, and they had told her they were “sick of all this woke nonsense” and the way Rishi Sunak’s return to national service had been misrepresented.
Turn out was down. Somewhere in the bowels of the BBC, Jeremy Vine seemed to be in a brightly lit cellar playing with his toys. “You’ve got a big one there!” Kuenssberg told him, admiringly. Mr Vine looked as though he was chewing a wasp.
Two bald men fighting over a comb
11:53. Gossip from Welwyn Hatfield that Grant Shapps was in trouble. The Partidge-esque David Bull, contesting West Suffolk, declared that “People voted for Reform because they are patriotic”. Apparently, what they fight over in the pubs of Sunderland is “Low tax and low regulation”.
12:15. Labour wins Swindon. The acceptance peroration sounded like a Guinness Book of Records attempt to present the longest ever speech at the Oscars. It matched the tedium which had gripped the audience. Having lost his seat, Robert Buckland turned his ire on the way the Conservative Party had been run as a circus. “Like two bald men fighting over a comb,” he claimed.
Over on Channel 4, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was injecting what sounded suspiciously like sense into the arguments. Then Rachel Reeves stepped up to make her acceptance speech.
The frog-like Farage
She is highly commended as an economist, but as John Updike would point out, “a healthy bore consumes each year one and a half times her own body weight in other people’s patience”. Just wait till Ms Reeves stands up as chancellor of the exchequer to deliver the budget speech, my dears. For the first time in history, the chamber will empty.
03:05. The TV showed a listless group on stage in Welwyn, where Grant Shapps stood with hands clasped and looking demure, as though waiting outside the headmaster’s study. He lost.
03:27. Nigel Farage appeared with that familiar mincing walk, and with the TV sound turned off his head movements when speaking make him look even more like a frog. He won.
In Ipswich, with delicious irony, the refugee-hating Tom Hunt was informed of his demise by the mayor, himself a Sri Lankan refugee.
If only we had listened to Liz Truss
In South West Norfolk there was a slow hand clap for Liz Truss, who had gone missing. Was she still in the pub? No, just hiding. Ms Truss is not good at accepting personal failure. But eventually she was chivvied out, and flung on to the stage like a marionette to explain that apparently all the problems were down to the world not listening to her, and we got what we had coming. (In fact, what the good people of that seat have coming is the genial and comfortable figure of Terry Jermy.)
Your diarist stepped out into the dawn with the realisation of an empty space inside; the alarming realisation that the world has changed… but where is the hope?
Labour have every right to celebrate, but little justification for hubris. They have won with the smallest majority since the war, and the swing from the Tories was little more than half what the polls have been telling us for the past couple of years.
Should we be scared of Reform?
Even that only happened because Tory voters decamped en masse to Reform. Yet from Labour’s spokespeople this Friday morning, there has been no mention of that party, Reform, to whom perhaps they owe their victory.
“I’m scared,” one of the East Anglia Bylines team admitted as the results came in. But we won’t hear that from either Labour or Conservatives, though both have good reasons to be.
For all Labour’s claims to be listening, we have to wonder to whom? They were not listening to all those Reform voters who left the Tories and so shaped their victory. They are ignoring them. When some taunting interviewer mentions their name, Labour’s people patronise them, and pretend that somehow all those crosses were really meant for them.
Whither Brexit and PR now?
For East Anglia Bylines and our readership, our two main passions have been ill-served. When the Visigoths of Reform have burst through the gate, eviscerated the Tories and effectively sponsored the Labour victory, can we imagine, dear reader, that Keir Starmer will be keen to give them more power by introducing proportional representation? With large numbers of voters so exasperated they will embrace xenophobia, Brexit and – let’s face it – fascism, do we expect Keir Starmer even to whisper that dreaded word ‘Europe’?
But progressive politics has made some progress in this region. Notably, the Greens won a momentous victory in Waveney Valley.
So what happens next?
East Anglian politics has become much more interesting. Perhaps uniquely. All five main English parties are represented here, and progressive politics has made some progress. Notably, the Greens won a momentous victory in Waveney Valley. The Liberal Democrats have won a crucial victory in North Norfolk. Two monsters of the last few years, Liz Truss (SW Norfolk) and Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) have both been deposed. (Permission to gloat granted.)
For all the shock they have caused, Reform only received the 15% of the vote that Pecksniff was insisting they would – albeit a regrettably influential 15%. (Didn’t the exit poll claim they would win 15 seats? Absurd.) And for all the criticisms and concerns, we at last have a prime minister of honesty and integrity. So Labour-supporting readers might recall that acknowledgement when, inevitably, this diary gives him a kicking.
As this diary is being written, Rishi Sunak has gone to the palace and spent so long with the king there were rumours they were playing three-card brag. Sir Keir takes his turn, but not being a card-player his audience was swift. It’s still raining in Downing Street. East Anglia Bylines watches and tries to learn, like all of us; to understand what has happened to the country and how we – you and we, dear reader – can play our part.
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