Coffee House Shots
Labour wins by a landslide
The stage is set. Get a front row seat in the run-up to the election by subscribing to the spectator for just £3 for three months. We'll even send you a free election mug. Go to spectator.co.uk/mug Hello and welcome to Coffee House shots. I'm James Hill. I'm joined today by Katie Pauls and Fred Nelson. Now, Katie, it's the morning off the night before, we know what the results are now. We have a Labour Lands line, the Conservatives' worst result of the Democratic modern era. What do you think are the top lines from last night's results thus far? Yeah, so we still have a couple of seats to go. But at the time of speaking, I think there's 12 seats left. So we have a pretty full picture. And as you say, at the moment, Labour on 410 seats, the Conservatives are on 117, Lib Dems are on 17. That's the best ever result. You have the SMP on 8 and then you have a series of independents, other parties we can get into later. And of course, reform currently on four MPs. Now, when the exit poll came through, I think what I found interesting was initially, there was almost a slight relief from a few Tories, I spoke to, just in the sense there have been MRP polls, the Salvation MRP, for example, suggesting they could be on around 60 MPs, double digits. So I think the MRP suggesting triple figures was almost, we managed to avoid the complete nightmare scenario where we effectively become a fringe party, we're not the official opposition, broadcasters can really ignore us quite a lot. And there was a slight moment of that. I think that from there to where we are now, as all those results have come in, and as we have seen in real time, successive Tory MPs, long-time Tories losing their seats. We've had Jacob Reese-Mogg, we just had Liz Truss before we came here to record. We've had Penny Mordent, potentially a Tory leadership hopeful no more. We've had Johnny Mercer, Jeremy Hunt managed to just, you know, narrowly hang on. If you name a person who lives in danger, there's a high chance that they have lost their seat. And also the places they've lost, the North East, I think you think about places where the Tory's been in rates in 2017 and 2019, in the North and the Midlands. They seem to be losing, you know, really lots of places there. They don't have a single MPN Wales anymore. And we also look to, you know, Surrey, older shop, lots of these areas that have long been Tory and they are no more. And therefore I think, you know, it's not just about, you know, we'll probably focus on the personality a bit in today's coverage. But I think in terms of where does the Tory party rebuild? Now it has been diminished to such a size. So I think that initial, oh, well, it could have been worse of all the options in the polls to probably just the dawning reality, which is if you are the Tory party having suffered your, as you say, worst results, what do you do for the next five years? You know, how do you rebuild and where does it go? And lots of the candidates potentially take over from British, you don't have already knocked themselves out. Now, I know Fraser will talk about this. I suppose the other comfort is potentially that the vote share does not suggest that the super majority, the majority quite matches where Labour is. But I think if you're a Tory candidate who's just lost their seat, or you're a Tory candidate who somehow clung on thinking about what's coming next, it's not too much comfort right now. Fraser, you've called this Labour's Potemkin majority and Labour's Potemkin landslide. Tell us why. I was really struck to see these videos come in because, of course, when the exit poll comes in, you see like 420 Labour MPs, it looks absolutely huge. The election coverage narrative, no matter what channel you turn to all night, has been huge Labour majority. Peter Mendelssohn declaring that a mid-year has struck Britain. But then, when you look at the votes, there's no mid-year, there's just Nigel Farage. Farage has split the Conservative vote, but Labour right now, I mean, as Katie says, not all seats have come in, but it's looking at 34% of the vote. So that is what we've lowest voting share of any prime ministers. So, never will you have seen a bigger disconnect between a number of votes, 34% of a number of seats, looking at 60, 65% at the moment. Never will you have seen a prime minister come in with such a low, popular mandate. So this means that Labour's result now is worse than it was under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. This means that Labour has won a super majority on a share of the vote less than that which Theresa May lost her majority. So we can certainly see in Westminster a big leap to the left, but can we see that in the country? I'm not sure that we can. I mean, not only have we managed to pick up just about a percentage point or so better than the Corbyn calamity of 2019, but we also see the votes listening of anything. I would place a little form to the right of the Conservative Party. And if you do that, and you see the reform has got 15% of the vote, that you can see that Labour didn't really pick up what the Tories lost. Now, this country has turned against the Conservative, so it's absolutely no doubt about that. This is the worst result they've ever had in their history of the party. Go back to the 1830s, you see nothing as bad as what they've witnessed right now. But what you do not see is a strong Labour result. Even by the standards of Labour elections, win or lose, Q Starmer is about middling, which is quite something for somebody about to win one of the largest majorities we've seen in quite some time. I suppose Katie Labour would say this is a validation of their strategy, right, which is that voter efficiency. They need to get as many votes as possible in a way to get as many seats as possible. And they've done that exactly that. I throw the key for all of this is Scotland as well. The S&P probably have had the only party to have a worst night in the Conservatives. Yeah, I mean, and I think we saw having stayed up one night, and some of the pundits initially, I think was treating saying, oh, pundits are going to say this is a disappointing result for Labour because of X, whatever reason. But if we actually have won a majority in this size, give us a break. So you can definitely suggest that we're saying, yes, it's a very large majority, the largest since 1997, but it's just not quite right for these reasons. But of course, what Fraser hits on is if you do have a majority that doesn't quite match the vote share, and also you have a party that's been quite vague about its plans, is it a bit thinner than it looks? But then the question is, what do the Tories do in that time? And I think we'll get back on to reform later in this podcast. But, you know, he looked at S&P, they have had a terrible night. They're currently in single figures in terms of the number of MPs. Of course, like the Tories, they've had the incumbency factor having been, you know, in government in Scotland. And I think, you know, the result certainly feels worse than quite fewer expecting in advance. And, you know, there's lots of tight suits for this has happened. You know, some saying, oh, John Sweeney should consider things. Of course, he only just took over before the selection. So it was always, you know, Richie's in next thought by calling the selection, he can maybe catch his opponents by surprise. It clearly didn't work with Labour. It clearly didn't work with the Liberal Democrats. It probably worked the best with the S&P. But I don't think that's been much to the Tories' help. Instead, you've seen lots of the work in terms that Scottish Labour recovery really paying off and Scottish Labour winning in Glasgow, winning in the Central Belt, as well as, you know, in the outer Hebrides. And that has been a successful strategy, which clearly reduces what you need to get a majority and a big majority. So I think that is a factor and it's going to be, you know, almost in of itself, the S&P story is going to be fascinating in terms of where they go next. But I think if we're looking, I suppose, at what's impacted things, you do get back to reform. And, you know, as Fraser said, they have taken a large share of the vote. But at the moment, they have four MPs. But I still think those four MPs are going to have a big impact because among them, we have Nigel Farage, we have Lee Anderson and we have Richard Tice. And I don't think the free will agree on that much, to be honest. But that's a noisy bunch. They're going to be in the House of Commons by the Tory Party, tries to lick its wounds and work out what to do. And I think that will impact the debate we're going to have on what role does reform play in terms of the future Tory leader and the future direction of the Tory Party embrace reformer does it ignore it. And you could see tonight already in these recommendations, everyone's very angry at Richard C not for calling the selection in July. Everyone's very angry about the D-Day Gaff. These keep things keep coming up. But the candidates seem to take different positions on what should happen, whether to move towards the reform or away from it. Yeah, I mean, Fraser, this is the real challenge, isn't it? She also got people like Jeremy Hunt, who talked about the only probably Tory target, who come on and defy the liberal Democrats, who are worried about that kind of orange threat in the south of England. Others are more focusing on the reform threat. I mean, how on earth do you kind of get the party to kind of keep together as a coalition when there is some are saying, look at the right, you've got a threat from the right. And some are saying, look at the threat from the left. I can't quite see the threat from the left. I mean, were the Tories lost of Lib Dems because they'd lost so many seats to reform. So there was no real Lib Dems surge here. There was simply reform coming along, acting as a sort of autoimmune attack in the right, eating itself. So let's take Jacob Reesmogg, for example. He lost his seat because reform came along, got something like 7,000 votes. Now, Jacob Reesmogg is probably one of the most pro-reform Tories. He was talking about how Nigel Farage should be, given a top seat in the conservative government, et cetera. So you can see that what reform voters got was rather different to what they wanted. They would have wanted more like more MPs like Jacob Reesmogg in Parliament, what they got was more Lib Dems in Parliament. So that's been the effect there. But the conservatives have got a long time, five years to work out what on earth they do next. We don't know what resistance next going to do. I mean, with time of recording, he hasn't resigned. But obviously, that's coming. And then there'll be a leadership election over the summer. And I don't actually think it's that difficult to test or look at what happened. I mean, they've spoken right, but govern left for too long. In the end, they left so much space to that, right? But the reform party comes along with a manifesto, which is pretty much conservatism plus, plus a few sort of pharages to tweets. And then we've got a situation now where the conservatives are really registered, as you say, the worst result in a couple of centuries. But Labour has not just failed to seal the deal, but failed to win more support than Corbyn. So I think this is now a fascinating parliament, because you're going to have a Labour government governments with a majority and a developer portion does popular support. You're a key star, maybe looking at his personal ratings, the lowest of any opposition leader who's become prime minister. So he's going to start from personally quite a low base, despite his parliamentary thing being high. Now, of course, our system, it's designed to be unfair. The first past the post system is firm, but unfair. That is the parrot of it. It gives decisive votes and decisive results. But I think Starmer will have to govern a little more cautiously if somebody with these other majority would otherwise suggest, because he will know that the public will turn on him very quickly. And the one thing I find myself saying this morning that I didn't think I'd say last night is that I think it is possible now that the conservatives could be back at the next general election. Previously, I thought that they'd be out for 10 years. But now when you see that Starmer's majority is incredibly wide, but it's also incredibly shallow, that is not a depth which a half-competent Tory party could not plummet. I mean, I think there's an interesting question, which is with a very large Labour party, how do you manage a Labour party, where some of the candidates have reformers their second, you know, Labour reform marginals now, some in the North, and others have the Green party, you know, moving towards them. And that's clearly going to be different demands on Kirstarmer. But I do think Labour will be very happy with this result. So as much as we say, oh, there's, you know, he is going to have to tread carefully all Prime Minister's will. I think Kirstarmer will have the scope to, you know, have some time for his plans. I think he will initially have quite a loyal party. And I think when it comes to some of the things they want to grow early on in terms of, you know, planning and so forth, that majority is big enough to push and wipe tricky stuff through, particularly because initially it will be all hail Kirstarmer in the Labour party. But there are definitely some signs of trouble ahead. And I think that, you know, this was an election where there's lots of little anomalies, and we had a podcast that I was just saying, what could it be? We got near a few of them. I don't think we completely nailed any of them. But if you look at the independence and the threat signals to some Labour politicians, you know, on the live blog last night, suddenly we heard Johnathan Ashworth lost his seat, you know, Labour MP, member of the shadow cabinet, offered out on the airwaves is less to see to an independent by only a couple of hundred votes. And that is linked to Israel Palestine. You had West greeting nearly lost his seat. Again, only by a tiny number of votes, a couple of hundred, did he keep his seat in illford? And that was again to an independent that he nearly lost him. Dangan Devaner has lost her seat to the Greens. That was pretty expected. But Jess Phillips, Birmingham, she also came quite close to losing her seat and Shabana Mahmud, the shadow justice secretary, she had a majority by, you know, a couple of thousand in the end against an independent, but her seat used to be one of the safest in the country for Labour. So it does mean, I think, you know, we'll see what happens with foreign affairs. But on Israel, Palestine, and what Kirstal might want to do on foreign policy, he is going to have a lot of MPs who have just seen what happened in this general election and are very worried about isolating parts of their vote even further. And some of those figures will be in his shadow cabinet. So I think there's lots for Labour to celebrate from this result, but this has not been a, you know, a clean sweep for any party because they're having casualties along the way. Perhaps it's been a clean sweep for Ed Davie, fresh from the roller coasters to their best ever result. I mean, I suppose the Liberal Democrats would have liked to get Jeremy Hunt's seat if they can. That stopped some of their, you know, sorry, dash as they had first envisioned it. But I think that, you know, delighted with some of the scalps that got such as Gillian Keege and the Education Secretary. Yeah, and lots to discuss on Coffee House. Well, thank you, Katie. Thank you, Fraser. And thank you, listening to Coffee House shots. [Music]