David Lammy likes to tell a story about sitting at his kitchen table with Sir Keir Starmer shortly after Labour’s cataclysmic defeat at the 2019 election. Having ascertained that the other man intended to run for leader, Mr Lammy cautioned him that hauling Labour out of the abyss and back into contention for power would be “a 10-year project”. “No,” came the sharp response from Sir Keir. “I’m going to do it in five.”
Was he truly convinced that he had it in him to pull off what everyone else regarded as mission impossible? Or did he have to tell himself this because he knew he’d probably only get one crack at Number 10? As it turns out, he’s taken his party from its most abject defeat since 1935 to a landslide victory, and pulled off that remarkable feat in a bit under five years, to become the 58th prime minister in our history and only the fourth Labour one to secure a parliamentary majority.
The outcome of this election may have been foretold, but that makes it no less momentous. All the advance tremors did not soften the impact of the earthquake as the Labour gains piled up over the small hours of Friday morning. Were you still up to see Liz Truss go down? How close did you come to rupturing a vital organ when you cheered to see Jacob Rees-Mogg dispatched? Fourteen years of Conservative dominance demolished and just 121 Tory MPs, the lowest tally in their party’s long history, left to squabble with one another in the smouldering rubble. Labour has not just returned to power after a long absence. It is back in the governing business with a stonking majority of 174.
This is a dazzling achievement by Sir Keir, the more so for being such a vindication of a strategy that very few people outside a tight circle of friends and allies ever completely trusted. When he made his first, stilted address in the role of leader, one delivered from his living room because the country was in the grip of a Covid lockdown, I had many heartfelt conversations with senior Labour figures. None thought, not one, that Sir Keir had a prayer of leading them back into government in a single parliament. The doubters included virtually everyone who now sits around the cabinet table. Mr Lammy is unusual in being ready to admit this publicly.
It is true that Sir Keir has had a large number of assists from the Tories, but he wouldn’t have won this scale of majority without the drive to turn his party into an electable alternative to Conservative rule. This makes it a highly personal triumph for the will to win of a leader who has often been underestimated and derided as timid and uninspirational. “Starmer is no Tony Blair,” sneered those seeking to make an unflattering contrast with the last man to take Labour out of opposition and into government. Sir Keir’s riposte has been to secure a majority that comes very close to matching New Labour’s first landslide. Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of the win in 1997, reckons the Starmer victory to be the more astounding achievement because Labour has conquered an electoral Everest from such a depressed starting base. There are many fascinating subplots to this election, but this is the big picture story to focus on today.
Welcome to Starmer’s world. He will bestride a transformed political landscape for the foreseeable future. This victory magnifies his authority over Labour and the government will not have much to fear from opposition parties anytime soon. The once all-conquering Conservatives are cut down to a twitching stump. The Tories are already descending into a postmortem about what has befallen them and the viciousness of their recriminations will be sharpened by seeing 4 million votes harvested by Reform. The SNP has its own soul-searching to do in the wake of the devastating losses inflicted on it. The Lib Dems, justifiably basking in the best result of the party’s existence, may decide to follow the example set by Sir Ed Davey’s mentor, the late Paddy Ashdown, in the wake of the ’97 Labour landslide. If the Lib Dems do that, they will aim to use their 71 MPs to forge cross-floor alliances in the hope of influencing the new government’s agenda.
The House of Lords, now on notice to expect reform of that arcane chamber, will be wary of mounting unreasonable resistance to a government with such a juggernaut majority. As the new cabinet arrived at their departments, the welcoming applause from civil servants was not entirely ritualistic. This regime change is being greeted with enthusiasm in Whitehall, not so much for reasons of ideological sympathy, but because it is more professionally satisfying for civil servants to work for a stable government with a sense of direction allied to the power to get stuff done. When trouble comes, as it will because it is in the job description of being prime minister, one probable source will be from within. Politics abhors a vacuum. A peril for big majority governments is that they generate opposition from within their own ranks. Sir Keir can relax that this is unlikely to happen in the immediate future. In the first flush of victory, the huge influx of novice Labour MPs who will be sworn into the Commons this week will, initially at least, feel obligations of loyalty to the man who made it happen.
So, I asked one member of the new cabinet, how long will the honeymoon last? “We’ll get the weekend, I expect,” he said, half-jokingly. The euphoria is tempered by trepidation. It was apt that dark clouds loomed overhead as Sir Keir progressed from the swearing in at Buckingham Palace to Number 10. When Tony Blair made that journey, he enjoyed a helpful tailwind from an economy expanding at a decent lick. The weather is much fouler for a Starmer government that begins its life with less public goodwill than New Labour enjoyed in 1997 and he takes office with the country in a worst state. Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, has a “shit list” of emergencies that could erupt during the infancy of this government, ranging from universities and more councils going bankrupt to a full-blown crisis in prisons. On top of the known booby traps, there will be as yet undiscovered ticking timebombs buried under the floorboards by the Tories.
Government debt relative to output is at its largest in 60 years. Taxes as a proportion of GDP are heading towards the highest level since 1948. At the same time, critical public services are either on their knees or on the floor. There’s some anxiety among Sir Keir’s team that the magnitude of the majority could excite unrealisable expectations about how quickly the public will see meaningful change. Ministers will try to buy time by saying that the mess left by the Conservatives is even more horrendous than they anticipated. Another answer will be to tamp down expectations of how rapidly improvement can be delivered. Sir Keir did that during the campaign by repeatedly saying “there is no magic wand”. He also sought to contain expectations during his first address to the nation as prime minister when he said that “changing a country is not like flicking a switch” and spoke of rebuilding Britain as an incremental job to be done “brick by brick”. His sober tone struck a conscious contrast with the bombastic vaudeville of the Tory years while reflecting the mood of a country he knows to be deeply disenchanted with its politics.
This was a revenge election in which voters expressed visceral loathing for the Tories much more evidently than they did any love for Labour. Sir Keir is at Number 10 on the back of a vote share that fell short of 34%. There’s never been a lower score for a majority-winning party since 1832. So while the victory looks commanding, the mandate feels brittle. Sir Keir sits atop a skyscraper majority, but its foundations are built on clay. The government wasn’t 24 hours old before it was getting warnings that there will be a fiery public backlash if Labour lets the country down. The answer to that is not easy, but it is obvious. Sir Keir will have to set about earning this majority by using it to deliver.
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He has astonished all those in his own party and beyond it who were once so sceptical that he was the man to take Labour back into power. Now he must confound the many doubters already noisily questioning whether his government will be equal to the towering challenges that have become Labour’s responsibility.
Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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