Goodbye to Tory Britain

The last time Britain traded a Conservative government for a Labour one, back in 1997, the mood was so buoyant that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” His successor Keir Starmer is far less of a showman, and even many of his supporters feel pessimistic about Britain’s future prospects. Yet the scale of Starmer’s victory today appears comparable to Blair’s landslide. Since Brexit, politics in Britain has been a clown show , and today, its voters decided it was time for the circus to move on.

The exit poll, a generally reliable guide to British elections that is conducted on polling day itself, predicts that Labour will win an overwhelming 410 out of 650 seats. The Conservatives are reduced to an estimated 131, avoiding the oblivion that some predicted but still deeply humbled. The immediate consequences are obvious: a Labour government with a commanding majority but a demoralizing inbox, and an opposition that will spend the next few days asking what the hell went wrong, the next few months wondering what to do next, and the next few decades arguing over who was to blame. The only consolation for the Conservatives will be to conclude that this was not a defeat for their ideology so much as a punishment for their incompetence.

From the start, this was a disastrous campaign for the Conservatives, who have ruled Britain since 2010. The departing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, chose to call the election early—he could have waited until the winter—and did so standing in the rain outside Downing Street, his words drowned out by a protester’s loudspeaker. The resulting front pages were brutal. Sunak’s early policy blitz, including compulsory national service for young people and guaranteed increases to state pensions, failed to budge the polls and revealed the narrowness of the base to which he was appealing. The party of business had become the party of retirees.

Worse was to come. On June 6, Sunak left the international commemoration of the D-Day landings in France early. Instead of staying to meet veterans, and taking the opportunity to look statesmanlike next to President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he scuttled home to give a television interview. Many took this as an insult to Britain’s World War II veterans. Even worse, the only news story that came out of the TV interview was that, when asked about the cost-of-living crisis, Sunak responded that his parents had made sacrifices because they did not pay for extra television channels when he was growing up. A man who attended an expensive boarding school , and whose wife is worth an estimated $800 million, should have been more self-aware.

[ Rory Stewart: When your political party loses its mind ]

While the Conservatives stumbled, their voters were lured away in all directions. A simple summary of this election is that people wanted the Tories out and voted tactically to do so. If the exit poll is correct, the Conservatives have lost seats to both pro-European centrists and the nationalist right, as well as to the center-left Labour Party.

Many commentators assumed that Sunak had called the election early to defuse the threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform—the successor to Farage’s previous two political vehicles, the U.K. Independence Party and the Brexit Party. If so, it didn’t work. After initially declaring that supporting Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election was more important to the world, Farage reversed course, deigning to participate in Britain’s parochial little vote. He ran for a parliamentary seat in Clacton, a deprived seaside community on England’s east coast, with his usual attention-grabbing mixture of bonhomie and threatening bombast. By the end of the campaign, Reform was polling in the high tens—close to the Conservatives’ own low numbers. Only the first-past-the-post electoral system, which punishes smaller parties, prevented it from picking up more seats. The exit poll predicted that it will have 13, up from one.

To compound the incumbent party’s woes, the Liberal Democrats, a pro-European party whose activists are known as tough local campaigners, challenged the Conservatives in dozens of wealthier districts—many of which voted against Brexit. The Liberal Democratic leader, Ed Davey, calculated that he would find it hard to get attention for his policies, and so decided instead to be visible . His photogenic publicity stunts began with paddle-boarding in the Lake District, progressed through going on waterslides and roller coasters, and finished days before the vote with a bungee jump in front of a reluctantly impressed press pack. (“Do something you’ve never done before—vote Liberal Democrat,” he shouted, while still suspended from the rope.) These attention-grabbing antics will be rewarded with an estimated 61 seats—a huge improvement on the last election.

As for Labour, its resurgence since the last election, in 2019, is almost unbelievable. Back then, under its anti-imperialist, unabashedly socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party crashed to 203 out of 650 seats in Parliament, suffering bloody losses in Scotland, northern England, and the southwest. Keir Starmer won the leadership election to replace Corbyn in 2020 on a platform of broad continuity with his program, before proceeding to smash it into tiny pieces. He and his advisers decided that Tony Blair’s creed—which holds that British elections are won from the center—was correct.

And so Team Starmer moved the party right on immigration, accepting the end of freedom of movement—the pre-Brexit principle under which members of other European Union nations could live and work in Britain without visas—while also expressing humanitarian and financial concerns about the government’s plan to process asylum applications in Rwanda. They moved right on the economy, promising not to “raise taxes on working people.” Starmer also moved right on cultural issues , embracing the Union Jack and declaring after years of confusion that only women have cervixes. Accepting that the Conservatives had won a big majority in 2019 on a promise to “get Brexit done,” Starmer’s party also voted in Parliament to leave the EU.

Some of Corbyn’s problems arose from his temperament. He was a lifelong backbench rebel thrust into a leadership role. Starmer, who was a human-rights lawyer and head of the country’s Crown Prosecution Service before becoming a politician, showed no such reluctance to impose his will. Those who stepped out of line were demoted, suspended, or purged (including, astonishingly, Corbyn himself ). The only real disquiet that broke through came because of Starmer’s slowness to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Even otherwise loyal allies expressed their frustration when he initially suggested that Israel had the right to withhold food and water from the territory, before backtracking in the face of grassroots resignations. The issue remains a sore spot for Labour, and several of its candidates faced challenges from smaller left-wing parties and independents running on pro-Palestine platforms.

Overall, though, Starmer’s Labour neutralized its former weakness on cultural issues, allowing voters to focus on the economy. Before Brexit, the signature Conservative policy was austerity—slashing public spending in order to reduce the national deficit. Local councils were particularly affected , leading to more potholes and fewer libraries, and unbearably tight budgets for adult social care.

Then came Brexit, which upended Britain’s relationship with the trading bloc across the Channel, and brought down David Cameron (the prime minister who called the referendum, but wanted Britain to stay in the EU) and Theresa May (the prime minister who couldn’t get a Brexit deal through Parliament). In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic put the National Health Service under incredible strain and saw the government spend £299 billion to support businesses and workers, causing the deficit to surge. Less than three years after his 2019 election victory, Boris Johnson was forced out of Downing Street by his party, which had finally grown tired of his chaotic, rule-breaking insouciance. (In typical style, Johnson declined to campaign for the Tories throughout May and June, instead taking two foreign holidays.)

The less said about his successor Liz Truss the better, although her disastrous 49-day tenure is when the opinion polls really turned against the Conservatives. Finally, Britain ended up with Rishi Sunak, a self-professed nerd whose happiest moment in politics seems to have been interviewing Elon Musk about artificial intelligence; he looked adrift throughout his time in office. Was he a future-gazing technocrat, bringing cool California vibes to drab Britain? Or was he an old-school cultural conservative, fighting the woke blob and sending kids off to army camps until they understood the meaning of hard work? He never quite decided. And as the third Tory prime minister in three years, he could hardly brag about his party’s quiet competence in contrast with Labour “ chaos .”

[ Tom McTague: Britain’s guilty men and women ]

By the last two weeks of the campaign, still trailing by about 20 points, the Conservatives had already conceded defeat. Their message switched to an entirely negative one, raising concerns about a Labour “supermajority”—a meaningless term in the British parliamentary system, which has no filibuster. If Labour won too handsomely, the argument went, the party would have a blank check to enact socialist policies. If the exit poll is right, that message might have worked a little—before polling day, the most dire predictions had the Conservatives holding barely 50 seats.

In 2010, when the last Labour government left office after the financial crisis, one of its Treasury ministers laid out a self-deprecating note for his replacement. “I’m afraid there is no money,” it read. That note became a staple of Conservative campaigns for years afterwards.

No one in Sunak’s team will be dumb enough to joke about the state of Britain to their Labour replacements now, but if they did, the equivalent note would be much longer. “I’m afraid there is no money left,” it might read. “And also the prisons are overflowing , interest rates are still high, wage growth has been sluggish for a decade, finding a state-run dentist is an epic challenge, one in five people is currently waiting for medical treatment, young people have been priced out of the housing market, a record number of families are homeless , and the nursing-care system for elderly people is a crapshoot at best .”

Looking at that list, you don’t even need to invoke ideology to understand what just happened to Sunak’s party. In 1997, when the Conservatives dropped to 165 seats, their departing leader, John Major, gave a gracious farewell speech —and then went to watch a cricket match at the Oval. “I hope, as I leave Downing Street this morning, that I can say with some accuracy that the country is in far better shape than it was when I entered Downing Street,” he told the assembled reporters. “The incoming government will inherit the most benevolent set of economic statistics of any incoming government since before the First World War.”

Rishi Sunak cannot say the same. That failure defines his legacy—and explains the crushing loss he has suffered.