The dust settles

This week: the Tories are out at last – but what did the election tell us? Also: on the ontological status of Middlesex; and the world’s fattest parrot.

I did not, if I’m honest, enjoy election night quite as much as I’d anticipated. The switch from watch parties to work, and alcohol to coffee, was a bigger gearshift than I’d expected; most of the livestreaming I did – for The Lead, Politics JOE and Oh God, What Now? – came too late for me to feel energised, but too early for most satisfying results to have come in. (A number of less satisfying ones, such as the survival of Iain Duncan Smith or Labour’s failure to take Romford, unfortunately had.) You can get a sense of my failing energy levels from how I sound on the episode of Paper Cuts I recorded with Miranda and Jason as the sun was coming up; the new dawn of 1997 all over again, this was not. 

Part of the problem, I concluded in the New Statesman column I wrote a couple of hours’ fitful sleep later, was that expectations – my expectations – had grown almost ludicrously high. (It’s no exaggeration to say there have been times, this past year, when the desire to be there to witness the Tories wiped out has helped me keep going.) And even though this was by some distance the worst result in the Conservative party’s long history, it was quite a lot better than some of the more extreme polls had suggested.

Another issue, of course, was the broadcasters’ obsession with Reform. It’s not great, from a liberal left perspective, that Nigel Farage’s party won five seats. But it did not get substantially more votes than its predecessor UKIP had in 2015, and it ultimately came nowhere near the 13 wins suggested by the exit poll. A BBC presenter’s claim that the “story of the night” was Reform – rather than the collapse of the SNP, or the rise of the Greens, or the LibDems’ winning the largest third-party seat haul in history, let alone the whole Labour landslide thing – feels like it tells us more about the media’s news values than it does about the actual result.

All that said, the Tories did win slightly more, and Labour significantly fewer, votes than the polling averages had suggested. I’ve begun to wonder if there’s a sort of equivalent to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that sometimes affects Labour’s voteshare – whether the act of measuring its polling can in itself move votes. In elections the party looks set to win (1997, 2001, 2024), after all, it tends to underperform expectations; but in some it’s on course to lose (2010, 2017), it exceeds them. That to me suggests widespread tactical or protest voting. This year, the Greens’ campaigned by claiming it was safe to vote for them as we’d get a Labour government anyway. Perhaps such strategies work.

That brings me to my other theory about this election. There are already signs that, having landed on 121 seats, someway clear of the psychologically important line of “below three figures”, many Tories were relieved, even weirdly jubilant. The risk is that this leads them to underestimate the scale of the loss and, like Labour in 2010, to wrongly imagine that the government’s delivery of policies the opposition opposes might in itself turn things around in a single term.

But this being an anti-Tory vote, rather than a pro-Labour one, surely makes that less likely. And if the polls in four years time suggest that things are close, then it’s at least possible that some of those who refused this year may hold their nose and vote Labour. 

That, though, is for the future. Once the dust had settled, and new Prime Minister Keir Starmer had begun appointing ministers on the basis of expertise rather than political expediency, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had used her first speech to talk about the need for growth and the importance of planning reform – an important but politically contentious change which a government needs to do immediately or it simply never will – I felt the first glimmers of hope about Britain I’d had in some time.

It doesn’t matter, right now, that Labour only got 34% of the vote, not 40%. It doesn’t matter, even, that Reform has five MPs. For the next few years, Britain has a Labour government that can do, within reason, what it wants, without constantly worrying about the prejudices of elderly homeowners or the Daily Mail. At some point – possibly not til after a leadership contest, but soon – the Tories are going to realise with a jolt quite how little influence an opposition really has.

Perhaps election night was okay after all.

On the ontological status of Middlesex 

Now the election’s over, I can, and need to, go back to reminding people I’ve got a book out, every time the clock ticks. And on election eve, helpfully enough, an episode of the Aspects of History podcast I recorded to promote A History of the World in 47 Borders some time ago finally popped out into the world. One of the topics that came up in the closing moments of that show was one which is not really touched upon in the book. “Middlesex,” the host, Oliver Webb Carter, suggested, “doesn’t really exist, does it?” 

Middlesex, if you’ve never had the pleasure, was the second smallest English county after Rutland, and the one from which London was carved.¹ My home, in the East End, would once have been Middlesex. So would the cafe in Stoke Newington, in which I am writing right now, and the offices of most of my employers, and really the entire centre, north and west of today’s Greater London.

Few of those places, though, would ever be described as Middlesex today. Which got me thinking: was Oliver right? Does Middlesex still in any meaningful sense exist?