Right up to the wire, Labour politicians could not quite believe they were on track for a historic election victory. Despite every poll for more than a year suggesting Keir Starmer would end up in No 10, they worried something could go wrong. For some, it was the ghost of 1992, when the polls predicted Neil Kinnock was on course to take power, but in the end John Major’s Conservatives clung on. For others, it was their fear that after 14 years in opposition, Labour had lost the ability to win. After all, in the last 100 years only three Labour leaders have ever won elections – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – and the last of those was almost 20 years ago. No opposition leader has ever flipped a landslide defeat into a majority in a single term. “I can’t help it,” one shadow cabinet member said. “I know everything points to a Labour win. But I still wake up at night in a cold sweat about it.” Yet with the exit poll indicating an overwhelming Labour victory, perhaps the doubtful can finally rest easy. When Starmer announced, after Labour’s devastating election defeat in 2019, that he was running for the leadership, he admitted: “To get from where we are to where we need to be in four and a half years is a mountain to climb.” As Boris Johnson squatted triumphant over British politics, few believed he could reach the summit. In some ways he has been a lucky general, up against an increasingly chaotic and divided Tory party – which blew up its own reputation for integrity and economic responsibility through Partygate and Liz Truss – and, in Scotland, a collapsing SNP leadership.
In recent months a theory has been doing the rounds in the bars of Westminster that Starmer found an old lamp some time in autumn 2021 – the point at which Labour took a lead in the polls – and the genie forgot to specify he could only have three wishes. But while many voters will have been motivated by the idea of punishing the Tories, nobody takes their party from a historic election drubbing to an equally historic election victory just by rubbing a magic lamp. Since taking over, Starmer has shown ruthlessness, iron discipline, fierce determination and political skill. The scale of Labour’s success, if the (usually dependable) exit poll is borne out by constituency results overnight, will mean a commanding majority of 170, falling just short of Tony Blair’s historic 1997 majority of 179 seats.
Starmer’s political skill will still be needed when he steps over the threshold of No 10 in the morning. Labour’s voter coalition is as broad as the Tories’ was in 2019 and will have to be held together if the party wants to secure a second term. Reform UK’s apparent success – in at least a couple of cases at the expense of Labour candidates – and the almost certain arrival of Nigel Farage to parliament’s green benches will mean an urgent need to tackle the rise of the populist right. The virtual wipeout of the SNP – down from 43 seats potentially to as few as 10 – will also mean Starmer will have to cast his eye to Scotland and to the issues, beyond the constitution, that concern voters there. But political skill alone will not be enough. Unlike the last Labour leader to win an election, Tony Blair, Starmer will inherit a fragile economy, stretched government finances, a climate emergency and crumbling public services. But like Blair, he has fought the campaign on a platform of promising change after more than a decade of Tory rule. Senior Labour figures hope their prudent approach to making big promises during the election campaign – which they argued the electorate would not believe anyway – will pay off, leaving expectations low. “Have we been cautious?” says one. “Guilty”. But what we have also been is realistic. It’s better to underpromise and overdeliver than the other way round. There’s been too many broken promises.” Throughout the election campaign, Starmer has argued that Labour’s manifesto policies are just “first steps” towards more dramatic change further down the line. That, if done properly, they will be transformational. Voters seem to have given him the opportunity to try. It will not be easy, but it will now be up to him to deliver.