If polls are anything to go by, Labour’s historic 1997 election win – 418 seats to the Tories’ 165 – is about to be dwarfed by this week’s vote. An exclusive survey for the Daily Telegraph recently predicted Labour would win 516 seats to the Tories’ 53. A political wipeout, in other words, seems to await Rishi Sunak and his government – their worst result ever. Hanging on to 165 seats in parliament, however woeful it seemed three decades ago, would put smiles of relief on most Conservative faces.
Hanging on to 165 seats, however woeful it seemed three decades ago, would put smiles of relief on most Conservative faces
Back in 1997, there was still a residual sense of what the party actually stood for. The Tories were led by John Major, an essentially decent, softly spoken middle Englander with a taste for warm beer and cricket. He was everybody’s ideal next-door-neighbour, but as a prime minister, something of a washout. Major was the kind of man, Stephen Fry once said, ‘who would note when Smiths the Cleaners were having a suede half-price day’ and, if borrowing your lawnmower, would return it with the petrol topped up and ‘a tin of Gold Block baccy’ as a thank you gift. Fry may have been snobbish, but his words caught something. Major was an analogue politician at a time when the world was going digital. It was clear the future belonged elsewhere.
In the opposite New Labour corner was Tony Blair: ten years younger, ten times more aerodynamic, and, in his Islington barrister way, utterly Vorsprung Durch Technik. He was the kind of sleek, upholstered politician you might have bought at the Conran Shop (though not, perhaps, with much of an extended guarantee). The face-off between the two, as Major climbed on his soapbox and New Labour’s state-of-the-art campaign whirred and buzzed into action, was like watching a lap-race between a Ferrari 500 and an Austin Morris Traveller. The Tories, yesterday’s men, didn’t seem to stand a chance.
But nobody expected the Conservative decimation that happened that night, particularly after four election defeats and Labour’s shock loss of the election in 1992, when they’d been widely expected to form the next government. Blair, terrified of complacency and history repeating itself, would offer no more optimistic prediction than a majority of between forty and fifty seats. They ended up with an overall majority of 179.
The reasons for the landslide were pretty clear. The Tories, bereft of their reputation for financial probity since 1992’s ‘Black Wednesday’, worn out by years of tearing themselves apart over Europe and allegations of ‘sleaze’ from a hostile media, were now up against a reformed Labour party which had ceased to terrify voters and looked like a government-in-waiting.
Boredom with the Conservatives, Major later recognised, was also a factor: ‘The irritation with the familiar and imperfect which can grow to fury as years pass.’ New Labour, under Blair, had dumped Clause 4 and its nationalisation vows, gained a reputation for law and order – ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ – and, with its cautious promises to the electorate (Blair’s ‘five pledges’ – including not to raise income tax, to cut VAT on heating to 5 per cent and, in a rather anodyne phrase, to get inflation and interest rates ‘as low as possible’) had finally gained the trust of Middle England.
Various moments from the election night would linger in the nation’s memory. Apart from the avalanche of Labour gains pouring across our television screens with swings as high as 18 per cent, there were other, more personal moments. On the BBC, as the results poured in, Paxman asked defence secretary Michael Portillo if he was ‘ready to drink hemlock’. To Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson, another studio guest, Paxman demanded: ‘You’re chairman of a fertiliser firm. How deep is the mess you’re in at present?’
But actually, for the Tories, there was nothing funny about that night of 1 May. Seat after seat which had once been Conservative – Edgbaston, Wirral South, Basildon, Harrogate and Knaresborough and, barely believably, the blue-rinsed Hove – tumbled easily to Labour. The word ‘landslide’, said pundit professor Anthony King, was too feeble for the occasion: ‘It’s an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on Earth.’ As Peter Snow’s graphics showed blue seats all over the country exploding and turning red, it was, said Brian Cathcart in his book Were you still up for Portillo?, like watching The Dambusters. Tory bigwigs looked grey and broken, mutteringly darkly about ‘questions’ that ‘would have to be asked’ in the weeks ahead.
Inevitably, as Cathcart’s book title suggests, viewers’ most vivid experiences of the night boiled down a few stark, individual beheadings. Foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind, chief secretary to the Treasury William Waldegrave, industry secretary Ian Lang – all were to capsize that night in huge defeats. There were unheard of events too, which showed how the country was changing. Ben Bradshaw, one of the first openly gay MPs, won for Labour in Exeter by 11,000 votes, having survived a viciously homophobic campaign from Tory rival Adrian Rogers. It was, he said, a sign that the constituents had ‘rejected fear and chosen hope’, and forsaken ‘bigotry and chosen reason’.
But all these seemed to pale, in viewers’ minds, beside the humiliation meted out to defence secretary Michael Portillo. Portillo, standard-bearer of the Right, Thatcher’s protégé, and for John Major the most menacing of all the Eurosceptic ‘bastards’ that might usurp him, had always had a mantle of invincibility, a feel of the Anointed One about him. Yet even he couldn’t withstand the groundswell of anti-Tory passion surging across the country. Losing his seat to the unknown 29-year-old Labour candidate Stephen Twigg – to roars of triumph and gasps of disbelief from the audience – Portillo was soon back in the BBC studio, looking smaller and more brittle than one had ever seen him. It had been, he was to remark that dawn, ‘a truly terrible night for the Conservatives’.
Does an even more terrible night await the Conservatives on Thursday? The seats held until now by Jeremy Hunt, John Redwood and Sir Iain Duncan Smith are all forecast for the chop, and one can hear the cheers of the crowd already. Will Rishi Sunak keep his seat, or be the first ever sitting prime minister to be chucked out by his constituency? We will soon know.
In 1997, the BBC’s political editor Robin Oakley said that, for the Tories, ‘it’s not so much a case of back to the drawing board as buy a new drawing board’ – those words should be heeded today. Should Labour get their landslide, much of the Tories’ fate will depend on the hard questions they ask themselves in the weeks and months that follow and the degree of honesty with which they confront voter contempt. As the ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock put it in 1997, ‘the Conservative party has given the impression that it takes itself more seriously than it takes the country. We, for a short period, gave that impression; we’ve been paying the price ever since.’
Something for the Tories to ponder perhaps, as they wake up on 5 July: a party that seems, to its electorate, to have taken nothing seriously at all.
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