What just happened

This week: really, why did we (I) imagine the Tories might have won London? Also: the Channel Tunnel and other fixed links; and a map of Britain’s helicopter network.

I wasn’t going to write about last week’s London mayoral election – partly because only a minority of this newsletter’s readers live in this fair metropolis, but mostly because it’s simply not that interesting. The change in electoral system¹ makes the results difficult to compare directly. But pretending we don’t know that and just comparing this year’s votes to those recorded in the first round in 2021 show a 3.2 point swing from the Tory challenger to Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan. Certain right-wing commentators have tried to paint this as disappointing when the national swing to Labour is much bigger – but given that the most pro-Labour areas have generally seen the smaller swings, and given that the mayor is eight-years in, and given that he has not, perhaps, set the world alight with his policy achievements, I’d say that was pretty much what you’d expect. A slight improvement on 2021; not an amazing one. Fine.

On another level, though, the extremely weird 36 hour period between the election and the results tell us rather a lot about the hole the Tories have dug for themselves, and how an easily-gamed media is stopping them from seeing it. So forgive me; I’ll try to keep it quick. 

I’m not sure whether Theo Usherwood, the former political editor of LBC, was the first to tweet or merely the first whose tweets I happened to see, so I feel kind of bad singling him out. But at 10.33pm on Thursday – a mere 33 minutes after polls closed – he reported that the mood in Conservative headquarters was “chipper”, and that the party was “‘utterly convinced’ Susan Hall has won London”. He stressed that this message came with a “strong health warning”; he also tweeted a follow up just 16 minutes later, noting that someone else at CCHQ had got “in touch to dispute any claim that they are ‘chipper’,” which is an extremely funny clarification to have to issue. 

But by then it was too late: others had got the same briefing, and the narrative had been set. On Friday, nobody counted the voters, merely the turnout in each constituency (this was, infuriatingly, the plan); but as this was the only data we had it was viewed in light of rumours of surprising Tory overperformance. Increased turnout in the eastern suburbs! Surely an anti-Khan rebellion must be brewing. Had not the papers, after all, predicted this very thing?

As the day went on, assorted commentators dusted off their “whisper it, but Susan Hall could win” takes – not necessarily because they believed them, but simply because they didn’t want to be the one who’d laughed off the possibility if it happened. That evening the BBC political editor herself tweeted that, “No votes have been counted yet... but it is clear tonight that the race is much much closer than some polls had suggested...” How any such thing could be clear when no votes had been counted was an open question. All that was clear was that a lot of people were saying the race was much closer than some polls had suggested.

And the moment we started to see any actual vote numbers, the narrative collapsed. 

I should admit at this point that I am no better. I spent Friday doing my best impersonation of a headless chicken, switching from breathless panic to eerie calm and back essentially hourly until friends were demanding I log off and go outside. (I did at least mostly keep it to WhatsApp groups rather than doing it publicly.) But nonetheless, it feels like an object lesson in how easy it is to game the British media. Was it institutional desire for Tory victory, or merely excitement in a dull race? The left’s instinctive belief it must lose, or the right’s instinctive belief it must win? A clever bit of spin, or merely one guy in CCHQ with a journalist’s phone number and an inability to understand numbers? It didn’t matter. We all had to endure another news cycle about Labour underperformance and surprising Tory resilience. And it was, as was clear by Saturday evening, complete and total bullshit.

This is obviously good for the Tories on that particular day. It may even have helped prevent the party being engulfed by yet another leadership crisis. Not for the first time, though, I wonder if this is a factor in why the party seems to be deluded, even now, about the scale of the asteroid about to hit it. Even as they lose, there’s an army of commentators poised to congratulate them on their victory. 

Still, I’m sure the media is going to get on top of its “easily gamed by the Tory party” problem, and the Tory party will get over its “easily reassured by friendly” media problem, any day now.

The book

Well would you look at this:

(Laura’s new book Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network may also appeal to many of you, incidentally.)

While we’re looking at things, look at this:

Exalted company to be in right there.

Anyway, two things by me written in a shameless attempt to  promote the book (though less shameless, perhaps, than the above). Firstly, this week’s New Statesman column: “Having spent two years trying to work out whether borders create national identities or national identities create borders, though, I am, if anything, less confident about which way the causality runs...”

Then there was this bit for the Guardian, about the 30th anniversary of the Channel Tunnel and how England and France have never really been that different anyway.

Hey, talking of the Channel Tunnel:

Some fixed links

The Channel Tunnel

Links: Folkestone, England and Calais, France

Dates from: 1994

Length: 50km

Form: Undersea rail tunnel. Cool

The idea of some kind of tunnel from England to France was first proposed in 1802. This seems a bit optimistic given that the two countries were then over a century into a period known to history by the cheery title of “the Second Hundred Years’ War”, and were just gearing up for a really, really war-y bit. So no one much seemed to think a physical link between the two was a good idea, even if it was feasible.

The actual digging started in 1988 and the tunnel opened in 1994, which was amazingly speedy by any modern standard. (Crossrail took twice as long, albeit with a city on top.) It cost £9bn – closer to £20bn today – and was at the time the most expensive construction project ever proposed. In retrospect, though, that seems like an absolute bargain, especially since the tunnel these days carries about as many passengers and as much freight as the fleet of ferries above it.

It’s never quite hit its full potential though: politically-motivated passport checks and less avoidable security ones mean it feels more like plane than train, while both low cost airlines and Britain’s failure to build any bloody rail infrastructure to allow trains to reach any further than London St Pancras have limited the destinations available. Plus, although it’s the longest undersea rail tunnel in the world, it’s only the third longest rail tunnel. Boo.

The Channel Tunnel does, however, mean you can sometimes take a train from London St Pancras to Marseille St Charles, from whose terrace you can see the Mediterranean, and that will never not feel amazing.

The Øresund Bridge

Links: Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden

Dates from: 2000

Length: 12km (8km bridge, 4km tunnel)

Form: Combined rail and motorway bridge