Ashen-faced, the defeated Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak took to the stage at 4.40am on Friday at the count centre in his Yorkshire constituency of Richmond and Northallerton, where he held his seat.
“Labour has won this election,” said Sunak, acknowledging only half the truth. The reality was that, as much as his rival party had won the election, the Conservative Party under his leadership had lost it.
The Conservatives were defeated because their vote splintered into factions amid internecine right-wing squabbling, which made room for the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in the north and east of England. The Liberal Democrats party, which returned a record 71 MPs, ate into the Tory base in the south and west.
This splintering allowed Labour under Keir Starmer to steal through the middle to take the majority of the 650 House of Commons seats, even though fewer people voted for the party in this election under its now-triumphant new prime minister than when Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
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Labour may have turned Britain’s electoral map red by winning a huge majority and about 412 seats. Yet nationally it barely increased its share of the vote from its 2019 drubbing. Labour won because it stayed disciplined and together while its rival broke into bits. There was, in truth, no enthusiastic embrace by voters of Starmer’s vision.
Recognising this may seem churlish to those who see only Labour’s huge majority win. Starmer has the seats. He can do what he likes. That makes sense if your gaze is fixed only on the Westminster bubble. But there is an entire British nation outside of that bubble, two-thirds of whom did not vote for Starmer’s party, despite its haul of seats. He was elected to govern that nation, not just Westminster.
Grievances over immigration and deprivation that spawned the surge for Reform have not gone away just because Labour won the majority of seats. Starmer recognised this, and explicitly reached out to the majority who did not vote for him in his speech on Downing Street on Friday.
Labour’s vote was up 3 per cent in England’s midlands, where it rebuilt its so-called red wall. It rose 19 per cent in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party was routed. In Wales and London it was down 5 per cent, dipping marginally elsewhere in the south of England. Compared to 2017 under Corbyn, Labour’s vote share fell from 40 per cent to 35 per cent.
The Conservative Party, meanwhile, saw its vote share collapse from 45 per cent to just 24 per cent. Reform and the Liberal Democrats, and not Labour, picked up the lion’s share of those lost votes. Yet Labour still triumphed. Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system is an unforgiving beast.
Starmer’s Labour won everywhere he wanted it to. It swept aside the SNP in the central belt of Scotland, reducing the nationalist party to a handful of seats.
Labour has also taken back most of the traditional working class seats in the midlands and north of England that it lost to the Tories under Boris Johnson in 2019.
Yet there is also an early warning here for Labour. Farage’s Reform UK, although it won only five seats, came second in some constituencies in the northeast with 30 per cent of the votes. It will cause trouble here for Labour in the years ahead.
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