Andrew Vine: Memories of Labour's 1997 landslide and the differences in 2024


And partly it was because the atmosphere inside was so unhinged, I had to get out for a few minutes. There were people weeping and shouting at the televisions as yet another once-solid Tory seat fell, and the expressions on the faces of ministers who had survived and hurried to Central Office ranged from blank incomprehension to something akin to having suffered a bereavement.
Normally, the Conservative operation was calm and focussed. In the previous elections I’d covered, it had always been Labour who were a bit seat-of-the-pants and prone to letting their emotions get the better of them.
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Hide AdNot this time. This lot were in freefall, panicked, disbelieving the evidence of their own eyes and having what felt like a collective nervous breakdown. It was bedlam.
Outside, I bumped into the Tory grandee and waspish political diarist Alan Clark, who had also stepped out for a breather.
He’d obviously dined well, and was all louche amiability, leaning nonchalantly against a lamp-post as if he hadn’t a care in the world. I asked what he made of the Tory massacre.
Clark considered his immaculately-manicured fingernails for a moment, then drawled: “Well, dear boy, you won’t be able to print this,” and delivered a colourfully profane and inventively scatalogical tirade about how Tony Blair had buried the Tories for the next decade.
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Hide AdHe was right, it wasn’t printable. And he was right about Tony Blair too, at 43 the youngest Prime Minister of the 20th century with a thumping, unassailable Commons majority of 179 seats.
Maybe they were shouting at the televisions again inside Conservative HQ at 3am yesterday, because it was 1997 all over again, even down to the size of the majority which was so very close to that won by Blair.
Exactly like then, the big names toppled, one after another. In 1997, the defining moment of Tory collapse was the poster boy for the Tory right, Michael Portillo, losing his seat, his face a mask of disbelief as the result was announced.
Yesterday morning that same incredulity was etched on the features of Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Gillian Keegan and the rest as each was ejected.
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Hide AdAnybody who stepped outside for a breather amid the political bloodletting may have reflected, as the late Alan Clark did 27 years ago, that they were standing at the graveside as the party was buried for a decade.
The parallels between then and now are striking. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Tony Blair won against a weak, divided Conservative Party that had run out of steam after a long spell in office.
Then as now, an embattled Conservative leader pulled this way and that by a party he couldn’t control and unable to command the loyalty of senior colleagues jockeying to replace him, had failed dismally to persuade a sceptical electorate to give him another chance.
And then as now, a Labour leader won from the centre ground against Tory opponents obsessed by moving ever further to the right.
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Hide AdLike Tony Blair, Sir Keir looks trustworthy and ready to govern. Their personal appeal is remarkably similar – both at pains to convey an image of hard-working decency, sympathy for those struggling with economic difficulties, patriotism and honest competence.
But for all the similarities between these two momentous election results, there are some striking differences.
A few hours after that conversation with Alan Clark, I was at Downing Street as the new young Prime Minister swept in more in the manner of a victorious US president than a British premier.
Though there was a lot of stage-management of the cheering crowds lining the pavement as Blair abandoned his car and walked up the street to shake their hands, the enthusiasm for the fresh start he represented was genuine.
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Hide AdThere was little of that triumphalism yesterday, and not only because such a spectacle sits awkwardly with a serious-minded 61-year lawyer who faces the hardest job of his life.
There’s little to cheer about when people are waiting months, if not years, for operations, or having to pull their own decaying teeth out because they can’t find an NHS dentist.
For all the scale of Labour’s victory, this is the most curious of landslides, less about positive feelings for the party and Sir Keir than sheer contempt for the Conservatives after 14 years, the five premiers, the infighting, the lies of Boris Johnson and the deranged economics of Liz Truss.
Blair came to power with an approval rating among the public of plus-18 per cent. Sir Keir’s most recent rating was minus-19 per cent.
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Hide AdHe takes office not on a tide of optimism as Blair did, but at a point when people are frustrated, feeling that nothing works properly and that they’ve been failed by government.
Blair was, at least until his catastrophic misjudgement over backing the US invasion of Iraq, a lucky politician and perhaps his greatest stroke of good fortune was winning at a time when the economy was growing strongly – five per cent in his first year in office.
The foundations of that healthy economic outlook had been laid by the Conservatives so ignominiously ousted by voters, but it was Labour which reaped the benefit – and had money to spend as a consequence.
No such good luck awaits Sir Keir and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, with a sluggish economy, colossal national debt and no pot of money to address the myriad problems in the public sector from health to transport to councils teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
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Hide AdThere will be no political honeymoon between them and voters, as there was for New Labour in 1997. They promised change and the landslide demands it happens fast.
If, in six months, the ambulances are again queuing up outside accident and emergency departments as the NHS sinks into another winter crisis, Sir Keir may get a taste of the public opprobrium heaped on Rishi Sunak as his premiership disintegrated.
And what of the Conservatives? How will they recover amid the recriminations already intensifying in their bitterness?
A clue lies in what came after the 1997 rout. Four years later, in the run-up to the 2001 election, I was on the campaign trail with the Conservative leader William Hague – Mr Sunak’s predecessor as MP for Richmond – when he addressed a meeting of business leaders in Bradford.
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Hide AdThey heard him out politely, but afterwards when I asked one of the most senior whether the Tory pitch had convinced him, he replied: “I don’t think we’re ready to give them another chance for a while yet.”
Trust in the party had gone. A week or two later, I again stepped outside Central Office in the small hours of election night to escape the frantic atmosphere of despair.
Two more emphatic Labour victories, three failed leaders and nine years would intervene before the public were ready to give the Tories another chance.
Just like that on that morning in 1997, the road back looks like a very long one.
Ends