Ross / Wearmouth Landslide

The inside story of the 2024 election
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-958-0
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

On 22 May 2024, Rishi Sunak stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced an early election, in an attempt to catch his opponents by surprise. Just minutes later, Tory hearts sank, with images of the Prime Minister soaking in the rain instantly defining his hapless campaign. The next six weeks delivered more mistakes, a betting scandal, apocalyptic Tory polls, bitter backroom arguments and finally the worst result in the Conservative Party's 190-year history. Keir Starmer's Labour, meanwhile, stormed to victory with one of the biggest landslides on record after fourteen years in the wilderness. But the party won with its fewest votes in almost a decade, raising questions about how popular Starmer really was. Scotland's voters abandoned the SNP, Ed Davey's Lib Dems surged to their best election ever and Nigel Farage once again blew up the Conservative Party's plans. This gripping account by seasoned Westminster journalists Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth tells the full inside story of the key tactics and powerful forces that delivered the most seismic upheaval in a generation. What role did Starmer's character play in his party's success? How did Labour's election machine engineer such a devastatingly efficient vote? Was there anything Sunak could have done to avert disaster? What does it all mean for the future of Britain? Blending exclusive interviews and explosive accounts from key players, Landslide sets out to answer these questions and more, revealing a dramatic and sometimes disturbing picture of British politics at a turbulent time.

Tim Ross is deputy head of news at Politico. He was previously executive editor for politics at the New Statesman and ran UK political coverage for Bloomberg and the Sunday Telegraph. He has written two bestselling books on British elections - explaining how David Cameron shocked pundits and pollsters by winning a majority in 2015 and how Theresa May shocked pundits and pollsters by throwing it away again two years later.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ross, Tim

Wearmouth, Rachel

Leseproben

Introduction

At 10 p.m. on Thursday 4 July 2024, the transformation of British politics began.

The broadcasters’ general election exit poll put Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on course to take power, with an enormous landslide of 410 seats. That was more than double the total the party won five years earlier. Starmer’s power would be unassailable, at the head of a huge House of Commons majority.

The seat forecast was a complete humiliation for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives. They were very nearly destroyed as a political force. After fourteen years in power and five Prime Ministers, the Tories were set for just 131 seats – the lowest ever tally in the party’s 190-year history, the exit poll said. When the results came in, it was even worse.

On sofas at home with loved ones, and in campaign offices surrounded by aides, the protagonists in the drama of the 2024 general election were transfixed. The thing about a seismic upheaval is that it can take those involved a while to process. As Starmer hugged his family tight, watching the pundits discussing his imminent appointment as Prime Minister, his most loyal aides just stared at the screen in silence. One remembers thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m meant to feel now.’1

Sunak’s team, scattered hundreds of miles apart, also had mixed emotions. The Conservatives had been ruined but not quite eradicated. It was awful, and there was grief, but it could have been worse, they thought. At least the Tories would still get to be the official opposition.

Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats, finally out of the electoral dog-house, could not quite believe they were projected to grow from a band of eleven to sixty-one MPs. They hugged and screamed at each other with delight. The final result was even sweeter.

The shell shock, giddiness and confusion continued in the days that followed. Several senior Labour MPs didn’t bother answering their phones when a ‘withheld number’ called on the morning after the election. It was No. 10 summoning them to meet the new Prime Minister so he could appoint them to the Cabinet.

Rachel Reeves was stuck in traffic and running late, which made her already frayed nerves even worse. She was trying to prepare herself for the long walk up Downing Street in front of the world’s media to be appointed Britain’s first female Chancellor. But her driver was playing some intense R&B music on the car radio. It was a bit much for Reeves, who asked for something calmer.

‘Smooth Radio?’ the driver offered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Smooth Radio.’2

•  •  •

This book is an attempt to understand the forces that dramatically recast British politics in 2024.

Labour won its first election in nineteen years, with 411 seats. The Tories fell to just 121 MPs, while the Liberal Democrats leapt to seventy-two. In Scotland, the SNP collapsed, losing thirty-nine seats. Nigel Farage powered back into the political front line and into Parliament for the first time. His late entry into the contest as leader of Reform UK blew up the Tory campaign and cost Rishi Sunak’s party dozens of MPs. Even though Farage’s team only secured five seats, they won more than 4 million votes and have changed the dynamic in ways that may not be clear for some time.

Why was it that nothing the Conservatives tried ever seemed to work? How could the country’s most successful political party finally lose its winning touch so spectacularly? Was there anything Sunak could have done? What did Labour do this time that was different to the previous four elections that the party lost? What kind of a leader is Keir Starmer and how did his character shape the end result?

Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign director – who was later promoted to be Starmer’s chief of staff in No. 10 – ran a highly disciplined operation. His team delivered the most efficient vote-to-seat ratio in history. How did McSweeney do it? What role did tactical voting play? What do the results say about the state of British politics and how will they shape what comes next?

Did the public even care? At 59.7 per cent, turnout was lower than at any election since 2001. It was generally lower in seats won by Labour than in seats won by the Tories.3 The pollsters – and the obsessive way the media reported every one of their surveys and seat projections – may partly be to blame. Before a single ballot had been cast, most voters felt certain that a big Labour win was inevitable. How did that affect the outcome?

In order to answer some of these questions, and others, this book draws on more than 100 interviews, private conversations, official documents, text messages, emails, Zoom calls, strategic memos, presentations and other information from people involved at all levels of the national campaigns in Westminster and in Whitehall. The vast majority of those who provided information and detailed first-hand accounts wished to remain anonymous to give their candid views on what worked and what did not. Many now work at the highest levels inside the new government and are not authorised to speak publicly. Others used to sit at the same desks and are now licking their wounds and trying to rebuild their careers outside politics.

Politicians and their aides watch their words carefully in public, but when speaking in private, as many have done for this book, some tend to pepper their language with profanities. We have chosen to retain their original language in direct quotations in the interests of authenticity. There were also moments in the campaign when racist language was aired that some readers may find upsetting.

•  •  •

The focus of this book is on the battle for power, and that was always only a contest between Starmer and Sunak. It was a contest fought mainly in England, although Labour’s resurgence in Scotland swelled Starmer’s majority.

The first part of the book deals with the build-up to the election, tracing the impact of the toxic legacies that both party leaders inherited on their preparations for the campaign. That political baggage – and how Starmer and Sunak dealt with it – had a huge influence on the results in 2024. The second part explains the Labour and Tory election plans and how the campaign directors prepared their activists for the so-called ‘ground war’. In the short campaign, rival parties compete to define the contest at national level in the media through policy pledges, speeches, manifestos and TV debates. The digital campaign, fought via social media channels on smartphones and websites, is now a central part of every election.

The third part deals with the campaign events that unfolded in the six weeks before polling day, including Sunak’s D-Day debacle, the election betting scandal and the remarkably effective performances of Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. It also takes a hard look at the polling industry in 2024. The fourth tells the dramatic story of the night of unprecedented upheaval that followed the exit poll on 4 July. The final chapters reflect on what the outcome means.

•  •  •

Elections are the moments when millions of citizens living in democracies exercise their muscle. Frontline politicians are the ones who get crunched or, if they’re lucky, crowned winners. The story that unfolds in these pages sometimes reveals a picture of professional politics that is not flattering. The UK has suffered repeated bouts of turmoil over the past decade, with senior figures in both main Westminster parties guilty of failures of leadership, backroom plotting and feuds that have little to do with voters’ priorities.

Despite that history, most people working in British politics do not primarily seek fame or personal advancement. They want to contribute to making the country a better place to live and work, often holding strong convictions over how best to achieve this. Elections are the moments when they get their chance. It is a high-risk business, and the rewards are rare and temporary. Most people lose, most of the time.

The two leaders vying for power in 2024 were unusual. They were classic mainstream centrist politicians of the type the UK has not had a chance to choose between for almost a decade. The transfer of power between Sunak and Starmer was smooth, courteous and good-natured. But a radical anti-politics mood is not far away, as the riots that swept the UK after the Southport stabbings in the summer of 2024 showed.

At the time of writing, the Conservatives are choosing a new leader. It will be either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch, both of whom hail from the right wing of the party, economically and socially. Nigel Farage’s already powerful influence is likely to weigh heavily on whatever His Majesty’s new-look opposition does in the years ahead.

Labour’s landslide buried the Tories in 2024. But the ground is still unstable. If Starmer’s opponents find a new figurehead who can connect with the public, as Boris Johnson did only five years earlier, another seismic change could soon follow.

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