“We were elected as New Labour. We shall govern as New Labour.” Twenty-eight years later, Tony Blair’s words still resonate. Standing on the steps of Downing Street on the day he became prime minister, he captured the meaning and the excitement of the moment.
Does anyone remember what Keir Starmer said on the same steps on his big day? Does anyone care?
All general elections have consequences, but some are more consequential than others. The history books will give more space to the 2024 than most, and comparisons with 1997 will be at their heart. Two contests that saw the collapse of the Conservatives after long periods in power; two that produced Labour landslides; two that saw huge gains for the Liberal Democrats; two where some of the loudest noise came from the fringe, fired up by hostility to the European Union.
Yet the differences are as telling as the similarities. In 1997, voters were as keen to install Blair as to remove John Major. In 2024, hatred of the Conservatives far outweighed love for Labour. In 1997, the Greens and James Goldmsith’s Referendum Party won fewer than 900,000 votes between them. In 2024, the Greens and Reform UK attracted more than six million votes. After the 1997 election, the two-party hegemony at Westminster seemed secure; now its future is anything but.
At least historians will have no shortage of material. The British General Election of 2024—the 22nd in a series that stretches back to 1945—will provide much of it. At 775 pages, it is by far the longest yet. This is because it is comprehensive rather than long-winded. However, I have one significant criticism. I shall come to this later.
As the dust settles, Robert Ford, Tim Bale, Will Jennings and Paula Sturridge tell a compelling story. It goes well beyond what we knew on the night—that Labour achieved its landslide victory with just 35 per cent of the vote across Britain. Labour’s tally of 9.7m votes was the smallest of any party winning an outright majority since the Conservatives’ 8m back in 1924. But the electorate then was just 22m. In 2024 it was 48m.
In a way, Labour was fortunate. The authors show that if the old rules of uniform swing still applied in England, Scotland and Wales, Labour would have won 90 fewer seats and fallen four seats short of outright victory. The Tories would have won twice as many seats as they did (249 rather than 121). So would the SNP (17 rather than nine), and the Liberal Democrats half as many (35 rather than 72).
If the old rules of uniform swing still applied, Labour would have won 90 fewer seats
What explains these differences? In broad terms, the answers were clear on election night. First, the swing against the Tories was not at all uniform. Instead, the more people who backed them, seat by seat, in 2019, the more they lost in 2024. This meant that many supposedly safe seats crumbled. Second, tactical voting enabled Labour and the Lib Dems to make extra gains.
The authors have taken this further and measured the separate impact of both features. They find that the departure from uniform swing cost the Tories 65 seats beyond those they would have lost on uniform swing, while tactical voting cost them a further 45. The SNP lost three seats because of its pattern of proportional losses and a further seven from tactical voting. (As with the Tories in England, the SNP suffered from voters’ determination to defeat incumbents.)
These figures are estimates, rather than precise calculations. But it looks as if more than 50 of today’s MPs owe their seats to tactical voting: 30 or more from Labour and around 20 Lib Dems. This is almost twice as many as the beneficiaries of tactical voting in 1997.
There may be more, indeed much more, to come in future. This is because of the scale of fragmentation in the election or, rather, its nature. More than 40 per cent of those who voted in 2019 backed a different party in 2024—a record. Much of this was the result of the Tory collapse—but by no means all of it. The rise of the Greens and fall of the SNP played their part, as did the decline of Labour’s vote in its strongholds, especially those with a high share of Muslims.
However, as the authors show, this was largely a result of voters switching within two big blocs—left-of-centre (Labour, Lib Dem, Green, SNP) and right-of-centre (Conservative, Reform)—far more than between them. Labour’s attempts to target “hero” voters—older working-class supporters, many of whom deserted Labour after the Brexit referendum—contributed little to the party’s landslide. Yes, it won back most of the “Red Wall” seats it had lost in 2019, but its vote actually fell in most of them. It was the way Reform syphoned off thousands of Conservative supporters in each seat that caused Tory grief and Labour jubilation.
In short, Britain has moved from two-party to two-bloc politics. The movement of votes since the general election has confirmed this. The rise of Reform has been largely at the expense of the Tories, and that of the Greens at the expense of Labour and the Lib Dems. That is not to say that no votes have switched from left to right or vice versa—or that these bloc-switchers will be irrelevant at the next general election. But currently, they are a sideshow.
All of which leaves us unsure of the future of fragmentation. Are we heading for five-party competition, perhaps aided in the not-too-distant future by a new voting system that helps small- to medium-sized parties? Or will we end up returning to some form of straight contest, in which the battle for Downing Street is between the leaders of two big parties, one on the left, the other on the right?
The great joy of The British General Election of 2024 is not that it answers this question—nobody can, just now—but that it provides everyone who debates it with all the evidence they need about Labour’s loveless landslide.
Now to the book’s drawback. Ever since the first in the series, on Attlee’s victory over Churchill in 1945, these texts have been respected for their academic rigour. The latest book is certainly as rigorous as the previous 21. But something is missing.
As a 21-year-old undergraduate, David Butler analysed the statistics for the 1945 book and wrote or co-authored all the books from 1950 to 2005. From 1974 his fellow author was Dennis Kavanagh, who carried on in that role until 2017. Butler was, and Kavanagh in his semi-retirement still is, fascinated by election people and not just election numbers. They cultivated senior politicians and party functionaries, earned their trust and gained large amounts of fresh information. Their election books came as near as any could to the inside story of each election. (At a recent conference ahead of the launch of the 2024 book, Kavanagh spoke of the occasion when, some months after one election, the prime minister complained of not yet being approached for their side of the election story.)
Sadly, those days are over. There are quotes from unnamed insiders, but these convey the mood at various moments, not hard information. Some of the big questions of the election remain unanswered.
For example, most of us were surprised when Rishi Sunak called the election six months early. How did he come to take that decision? When did he finally decide? Who most influenced him? The authors fail to solve the mystery. They summarise the various widely reported arguments on both sides, but not when and where the final decision was taken, who was there and whose view prevailed.
Two previous books told us far more about decisions to hold other sudden elections, those called by Edward Heath in 1974 and Theresa May in 2017.
We were surprised when Sunak called the election six months early. How did he come to take that decision?
Past books also contained fresh, often detailed information about the parties’ private campaign polls. Some time ago, I was commissioned to write a feature on the growth of private polls since the 1950s. I found almost everything I needed from the books in this series, including detailed numbers from key surveys.
If I had to update my feature, I would have to look elsewhere for information about 2024. The new book mentions some of the broad lessons from private polling, but little about the research itself. How much was done each day? What was conducted inhouse and what by which outside agencies? Whom did the number-crunchers report to, and how often? Were there particular findings that made a difference?
The book’s narrative also suffers when its laudable attention to detail distracts it from the big picture. Labour’s biggest mistake was fundamental to the mess it’s in today. It failed to plan properly for government. The most obvious example was its manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, National Insurance or VAT rates. Like many journalists, the book quotes the scepticism of Paul Johnson, then head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. I know senior Labour figures who shared his scepticism. Were such doubts raised within the party’s campaign—and if they were, how were they dismissed? Did Rachel Reeves do any contingency planning in case—as happened—the numbers worked out worse than she expected?
Or consider some of the reviews now taking place: Louise Casey on social care, Alun Milburn on youth unemployment, Peter Kyle on excessive business regulation. These were all utterly predictable challenges for the incoming government. Why did they fail to draw up their plans in opposition? It’s a pity the book fails to explore these issues.
The book does have great strengths. Its analysis of the data is brilliant. Its narrative is clear and well ordered. But that narrative also has odd gaps. It tells us how Starmer hired Sam White as his chief of staff and Deborah Mattinson as his strategic adviser in 2021. They were plainly important, senior appointments. The book notes that White left the following year, but not that he was sacked, let alone why. Mattinson’s departure after the election is not mentioned at all. Power struggles are part of every campaign. Their stories matter.
I do hope that the next entry in this venerable series revives the tradition of finding out more about the people, decisions, arguments and mistakes of the general election. We deserve to know what actually happened behind closed doors.
