281. How one night transformed British politics

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0:49Welcome to the Restus Politics Post General Election special with me, Roy Stewart. I'm the honest Campbell. So, quick explainer for people who've not been up all night like us and this is us. I think we can now claim we've been up for 26 hours. Oh, I think 26 hours. You had a nut. Well done. Well, very well done. No wonder you look so terrific. Anyway, the results. Currently 645 out of the 650 seats have been declared. Labor currently on 410 seats. That's they've added 210 seats. Conservatives have lost 249 seats dropping down to 120. The Lib Dems have gained 63 seats, getting up to 71. And as you can tell from the difference, 63 and 71, that means they went from 8 seats to 71 seats, unbelievable.

1:40SMP, other direction went from minus 38 down to 9, absolute extraordinary. And then there have been some very interesting developments with independence, Greens and the reform party. So independence 6, reform 4, Green 4. And this is an extraordinary election. It's extraordinary because it's one of the biggest labour landslides ever. It is one of the biggest landslides ever. It's also one of the lowest turnouts ever. So, a lot of people didn't turn out to vote. Whatever that means, vote trapecy, they thought it was all on the bag. Little bit worrying maybe. An amazing performance for the Greens who've quadrupled the number of their seats in parliament.

2:25Very strong showing from reform, which is a new party, which somebody calculated has taken a million votes for every seat they've taken. And that's because our electoral system means that they got a lot of votes better on the country. But they only managed to get four seats. In fact, they probably got 50 % more votes than the Lib Dems. But the Lib Dems ended up with 71 seats and they ended up with four. The Lib Dems who normally complain that the electoral system works against them in this context has actually worked quite well for them. I thought I'm in the big, big, big story of the night. It's a change of government.

2:59New Prime Minister, Kierst Armor, who I thought spoke really well. I just think it's interesting how I saw this with Tony Blair. I mean Tony Blair, people said at the time, had all the charisma and all that stuff. But I noticed when we had one, and people knew that we'd won, people started to look at him in a different way. And I felt that we're here tonight. And you felt that he was almost speaking in a different way. Yeah, I think we're more confident. Object to himself more confidently. Now, the truth is, there are going to be massive challenges ahead. First mini head ache, well, big headache for the two people involved, but mini head ache for him, is he probably thought he'd just transfer the shadow cabinet to the cabinet.

3:35But in this rather strange outcome that we've had, despite a landslide, Labour lost some seats. And two of those were belonging to shadow cabinet ministers. So thank him, Deb and Aaron, John Ashworth. But gone. Yeah, partly a story there about the Greens and the rise of the Greens. And partly a story about this new phenomenon that's emerged with these six independence, which is the Labour left splitting off people who are, think that he wasn't clear enough in his condemnation of Israel, his support for Gaza, have generated MPs who in some cases have defeated Labour candidates. In some cases came very close.

4:14We're streating the whole century. We just sent you just one by, I think, about 500 votes. Yeah. So Labour will be a little shaken by that. Where there is a large Muslim population, Labour will down 20%. And I think you have to put a lot down to down to Gaza. I think of the more dramatic moments of the evening, I think Jess Phillips acceptance speech after what was clearly a horrible campaign with people, opponents, gallaway types out and about. Shalthing it. Abusing her, reducing her staff and so forth. And she actually said today, I've got quite a move. She said that Joe Cox's family were going to go and campaign with her today and she felt she couldn't take them into that environment.

5:01I think the only moment of the night when I literally could not contain my absolute joy was Listerus. Because that says to me, if you do a job as badly as she did it, you are going to pay a price and she's paid a very heavy price. Well, there's been a lot of people saying the countries had enough of the psychodrama of the conservatives. So maybe this is the last time we refer to this. But obviously the conservatives were the really big losers here. They were in government. And in 2019, the last election, they got one of the largest vote shares they'd ever received. Got a vote share up in the sort of 43 % and now they've crashed out to 22%.

5:43And in the process, they've lost enormous numbers of cabinet ministers. And this is because it's almost as many cabinet ministers have been lost since the Second World War and elections have just been lost. So devastating for them. But it's also reshaped the party. So you talked about Listerus. That was very, very dramatic and maybe we can come back to that because that was a huge majority and she seemed to say she couldn't pass it. That was one of the safest seas in the country. Definitely. And use our labor. Would have thought she couldn't possibly. For me, as somebody who comes from the centre left of the Conservative Party, I'm a bit troubled because the cabinet ministers who were very much on the centre left lost their seats.

6:29Alex Chalk, the Lord Chancellor Justice Secretary Kagan, we've been in Jinn and Kagan, both in the Fraser who we've interviewed on leading. And also some of the up and coming bright young things, Rupert Harrison, Wil Tanner, failed to take their seats. So who's left, do you think they would make a pitch for these bad luck? Bravo, man. Yeah, so the Penny Morden's gone. The right kept their seats. Penny Morden was beginning to pitch itself some more of a sort of one nation cabinet that she's gone. So left are Kemi Badenock. On the left, Tom Tuggenhardt kept his seat. Clearly, James Kelly, narrowly kept his seat.

7:09And Jeremy Hunt, almost miraculous seat, managed to keep what now seems like a very similar majority, see a 7000 majority when other people are losing 17 ,000 mergers. Interesting. In the discussion that we had on Channel 4, where Nadine Doris was kind of ridiculous. But one interesting point I thought she did make, well two points. She said she had no interest in doing any sort of deal with Farad, which I thought was quite interesting. And secondly, she thought that the Conservative Party should go for Jeremy Hunt. I didn't think she thought they should. She thought they would. She thought they would.

7:41So it's presumably completely wrong. Well, so I think it is totally wrong. I mean, she, because she noticed some of the people on the right lose their seats like Jacob Reesmark, she has overinterpreted that. But actually, I think if you look at the figures coldly, we now have a Conservative Party that has many more brexiteers than Remainers, many more supporters of Boris Johnson than opponents of Boris Johnson. And I don't think Jeremy Hunt is going to want this job. I think he will feel that he's been in government a long time. Do you think the way he comes up pointed, given the scale of the defeat that he didn't lose?

8:18I mean, he really thought to win. To be fair to him and Rishisunak, they fought hard, didn't they? But he can't have thought that he was going to hold it. I mean, that was a very slim majority. So he was up against the Lib Dems. And Jily and Keegan up against the Lib Dems lost the majority 23 ,000. He was defending a majority, no short, about 7 ,000. So he can't have thought that he'd make it through the other end. The other interesting thing in terms of losses, three seats that used to be held by Prime Ministers, Boris Johnson, Henley, Theresa Maymaid and her David Cameron Whitney, not now the candidates, but all very, very safe seats for the Tories all gone.

8:54And what does that tell you? What it tells you is that the remain -voting conservative seats closer to London have been completely alienated by the hard Brexit antics of Boris Johnson and the behaviour of Lestras. And they're the natural centre -right of the party and they're drifting towards the Lib Dems in large numbers. Will you finally admit, Rory, the Ed Davie, played a blinder in his election strategy? I'm very reluctant to do that, but I'm certainly happy to say the Lib Dems have played a blinder. And he was the boss. I think, regardless of what I think about him on the water slides, I think where he's been completely vindicated, I had an argument with his chief of strategy about two months ago, wherever he's saying, why are you not talking about single market more, why not talking about national policy?

9:43And he said, we're just fighting a local campaign, we're going to win by very narrow margin as many local seats as we can. Tories seats. And we're not interested in doing these big, big national campaigns. And boy, do they do, they squeezed out of a vote share, which has barely moved. They managed to shift up from, you know, whatever it was, eight up to seventy seats. Yeah. One of the happiest interviews of the evening was Anasawa. And one of the least happy was Stephen Flynn, the S &P leader in Westminster, not held by the fact that he looked like he was in a graveyard. It's standing in front of a big grave stone, but I was surprised the extent of the S &P collapse.

10:23I thought they were held up better. Yeah. In fact, we should just quickly go through the different nations. So England, Labour has dominated, but the Lib Dems performed well. S &P has been essentially wiped out in Scotland. Lost Glasgow, they've been reduced to a rumm. The Conservatives have been completely wiped out in Wales and in Oxfordshire. And then in London. And then there's been some transformations in Northern Ireland as well. But let's just do Scotland first. So there's going to be with all these losing parties, Conservatives going to fight for their souls. Where do we go wrong? In the Dean Doris will say it's because we've got rid of Boris and his boisterous energy and other people will be like, it's because we didn't deliver growth and just in greening or be like because we didn't get behind aspiration, whatever it is.

11:12The S &P is, you can feel them arguing. Some of them are saying, oh, it's nothing personal. It's just an anti -tory vote. And that's not going to not be, they're not going to get out of the hole if they just convince themselves it's an anti -tory vote. They got, they were caught up at the time for a change in mood as well, but they are the government. And then they're saying, well, it's not really our fault because we're just devolved government. We're not really responsible for all the stuff that's going on Scotland. But I felt on the doorstep so I've been up in Scotland that there was a very, very strong feeling from people that public services were not working.

11:42People hadn't necessarily changed their views on independence. But many people were saying that I'm somebody believes in independence, but honestly, the S &P hasn't delivered on health, hasn't delivered on education. Now, to flip around, you'll challenge to me, will I admit that Ed Davie's strategy of coming off bungees was vendor -candy. Will you now admit that Kierstheim's Mingval strategy was vendor -candy? Absolutely. 100%. I still would like the campaign to have been more dominant of the narrative. It was interesting, some of the polling we saw, that the three most remembered parts of this entire campaign were D -Day, Rishisunat coming back early, betting on the date of the election, and Rishisunat getting wet on day one.

12:36Now, Labour having won this election so comprehensively, you'd have thought there'd be something in the top three that was for Labour, but there wasn't. So, yeah, you can listen, you have to judge an election campaign, particularly if it's about the opposition, you've got to judge it by the result. And we talked a lot tonight about the efficiency of the vote. Labour did not put too much effort into seats like Kierstheim, where he actually had quite a big fall in his support. They put all the effort in the place where he used to work. And this often sign the master's strategist, and I believe General Kutuzov, the Russian general, would often say, it's all very well, these kind of French with that glamour and their beautiful movements, but all that matters is winning.

13:17You just grind them down. That's going to have to make it. That is my view. However, in politics, the winning is the beginning of something that is tougher. And I think that where I think they are going to be in a better position than people maybe thinking, give them credit for, the size of the majority, I think gives them a lot of scope to take these issues like growth, planning, reform, housing, some of the big things they've talked about, I think they can feel more comfortable now about fleshing out some pretty difficult stuff. And that's what I need to do. It also looks like it's resolving one of the big conundrums when you're running a campaign, because traditionally, it was considered to be very, very important to put things in a manifesto if you wanted to drive them through quickly.

14:03And there was reasons for that. One of them is that the civil service reads your manifesto. And if it's in the manifesto, they prioritize absolutely above everything else, very easy to get stuff done. But of course, Theresa may lost by trying to reveal her social care policy in her manifesto is basically why she lost the election. She didn't actually have a betting scandal. She didn't stand in the range, she didn't skip the date. She lost on policy. And Labour maybe understands that in this modern world, maybe you just have to take the risk of not revealing a policy and then use your big majority to do radical things when you're in.

14:36Yeah, just briefly on Northern Ireland, I think the big story there is in base, the junior losing his seat to Macallister, Malachim Alistair, who's kind of, you know, so anti -everything that we've been trying to do. So traditionally, the DUP was often perceived as quite obstructionist, quite anti -peace, multiplied that by several factors. And that's the MP that's now replaced the MPs. Yeah. So in a sense, this is part of a story we talk about a lot, as the DUP began to compromise, signed up a little bit more to the Good Friday agreement, suddenly something pops out on their right and see more extreme.

15:16Yeah, so I think that could be tricky for Hillary Ben, who will, I presume, be the new Northern Ireland secretary, because that situation is still a pretty fragile. I think that was a, I do think Hillary Ben will really get a grip of that, though, and I know he's been in an awful lot of work to get on top of the politics, we'll be already. Okay, I'll just a quick break back in a minute.

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16:53How now, Alistair, are we going to be presented with the new leading figures in the cabinet? So in 97, did you have a view on, you know, we're going to put Robin Cook out next week and we're going to focus on Gordon Brown this week and we're going to David Blankett's going to come out the week after. I mean, how do you, if you have this team, how do you introduce them to the country? How much of it is about the leader for the first couple of weeks? How much is about pushing the team out so that people can see them? I think we'll now see more of the team. I think they brought a campaign that was very much about care and a very small number of shadow ministers.

17:34So for example, we saw next to nothing of David Lamy in the campaign, we saw next to nothing of Ed Miliband, we saw next to nothing of Eddie Cooper. Now I wonder if that was because they were amongst the small number of people who had actually been ministers before. And the message was changed. So they were putting out the, although no, Patrick Faden was seen fairly high profile. But I think what you'll see today, Keir Starmer will speak outside Downing Street, will start to point to Cabinet, lots of stuff that's already in the diaries, you'll have to do, quite a lot of it foreign policy related.

18:05And then you'll see the cabinet starting to do stuff. But what we tried to do, we tried to organize everything around the central themes of modernisation. Education was a priority, so Blanket was out very high profile. Gordon had his big day one surprise on bank -uping and independence. That was like a really big thing which set the agenda quite a while. And then it is interesting that I still remember it to this day. Banking on. Yeah, just the impact of that because in felt so exciting and felt so original, it felt so radical. And it was something that really excited, wants an economist, but it also excited the public.

18:42And it felt like, woo! No, I don't know whether Labour have anything like that up their sleeves. What's interesting is that when Gordon announced it, there was no fuss over the fact that nobody had mentioned it during the campaign. All that we said in the manifesto was that Labour will endeavour to ensure economic stability and keep interest rates and inflation low. So that was the line in the manifesto that allowed us to say, and here's how. I wonder whether that's going to be a pro -Falabia. It deliberately kept it back as a surprise all the way through the campaign. Yeah. So you were never tempted to think this could be a moment to get a few more votes in the campaign.

19:20You thought, well, we can hold this back and make it our entry point. It would have been as effective during the campaign as it was in government. The campaign was pretty well put together, built like years around these very specific pledges, Tony doing a lot of the big picture messaging of modernisation, which for care was changed. It was very interesting in his speech tonight where he said, we ran as a change Labour party, we were governors of Change Labour Party. Tony literally said the words in his speech, we ran as new Labour, we were governors of new Labour. So the quiet lot of echoes going on.

19:53And the other thing that happens very quickly is how rapidly people get used to the idea that this is the new government. It's really amazing. And I thought one of the best moments of the evening, slightly ruined by his second speech to the party activists. I thought, originally, Sunak, actually, he's accepted in Richmond, his acceptance speech, or winning the seat, I thought he spoke really well when talking about this seamless, peaceful transition. I think when he's happening literally overnight. No, I think that's right. And it's in those moments that I felt some residual pride for the disgraceful mess the conservative party.

20:35And felt very, again, alienated, I'm afraid, by the way, let's trust behaviour. She turned up late to her count. She didn't give a speech. And I get extremely annoyed. The sort of pomposity from Jacob Reece Mark a lot of the time. And I think his defence of Boris Johnson is kind of incomprehensible. But he knew that he'd lost that sunset seat. And he still came into the interview. We spoke to him two hours before the result. He already knew the result. He was courteous. He didn't give anything away very straightforward. But he was so cheery that Emily made this, she said to him, what we can tell from the fact you're doing this interview that you want.

21:16And he said, well, I wouldn't take anything for granted. It gets a complete sort of perfect face all the way through. And also he too congratulated Keir Starmer. Yeah. So wish them luck. Jeremy answered the same. And there was no sort of pumpers sort of attempt to launch some grand analysis. He just said, you know, new root string. And Jeremy Hunt said, really good luck. I think they're very decent people. I think, you know, Keir Starmer is a very decent person. I think it's a real opportunity. And I agree with him. Maybe Labour can do something to reform the NHS, which the Tories couldn't do because the Tories are not trusted enough for the NHS to be radical.

21:51Labour maybe could do unpopular things because they've got a bit more trust and space. So as we kind of move towards the end, just to kind of summarize where we are for people who've didn't stay out right the way through the night. Incredible victory for Labour. So Labour's now in a commanding position. You know, 411 seats, it's sort of beyond imagining. And to put it in context, the Conservatives were feeling pretty cheerful under Boris Johnson when they had 365 seats. But Boris Johnson got 365 seats on 43 .6 % of the vote. Labour has got 411 seats and they've probably done it on only 33 .9 % of the vote.

22:32Is that what we all thought of? That's what currently what this is showing. 33 .9. These figures will change, but at the moment that's what it's showing. It's pretty low. Very, very low. Probably the lowest in record that is a governing party coming in with such a low vote share. And it's also true that the turnout is one of the lowest on record. So great victory for Labour, opportunity for Labour, but it's a product of this strange first pass of the post system and under the surface, some things to worry about. Why didn't voters turn out votes in larger numbers? I mean, it feels like the major parties together may have only got 56 % of the vote between that will be the lowest joint vote share.

23:10I mean, these parties used to get 90 % of the vote between. So sorry about new parties emerging. So sorry about the beginnings of the rising of the far right populists reform taking off, scooping up, forming votes. I'm waiting some wins, every time we call it the far right. Formate, form of in votes. And but it's also sorry if the Greens popping up, it's sorry, it's so sorry, it's a sort of a much more fractured politics. Even if it's not shown in the seats, if you look at the votes in the country as you pointed out, it's the first time what was your thing? That four parties have got over 10 % and five parties have got over 5%.

23:43First time ever. So very, very striking, a sign of a different type of Britain, different type of British politics. Good, well, it's very been very enjoyable. I always spend the all night with you in a pot and sweaty studio with the lovely Emmy Maidless and Christian Grimerti and a session of a carousel of politicians. I was looking at the other channels. I think they've got some pretty good guests in there. The rest all looked a bit dull. I think we did well. I think we did well. We did sometimes feel when there were sort of seven people around the table talking for 12 hours a bit as though I'd enter one of your nightmare French discussion chairs.

24:17Well, there is a French program that I've been called Lagon Libreille, they're the great bookshop and it's just they have this sort of authors round exactly around the table that we were at. They all sort of sit there with these wonderful philosophical students. They were asked presumably, but the question is, is reform unreformed? Is labor unlabored? Is the conservatives no longer conservative? By the way, I wish we'd done more audience in the election because one of the best bits was the audience interaction we've finally got them to speak. They were great. We should do much more than they love to hear something.

24:50Next time when we said they were open to long -term TV presenters and then they said that they didn't really believe you'd be able to achieve much. Thank you very much. See you soon. Thanks again. Bye -bye.