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Rosa Prince is Deputy UK Editor at POLITICO in London.
LONDON — Keir Starmer spoke of the “sunlight of hope” as he hailed his landslide victory in the U.K. general election.
But there is a cloud in the sky blotting out a little of the new prime minister’s sunshine: Nigel Farage and his upstart Reform Party.
It seems improbable that Labour’s enormous electoral achievement in booting out Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservatives after 14 years may not be the main takeaway from election 2024.
But while Starmer’s stonking 400-plus seats may look good on paper, dig a little deeper and those shiny new Labour MPs heading off to Westminster would be wise not to be complacent about their prospects of remaining there for long.
There is little doubt that this election was a loss for the Conservatives rather than Labour’s gain; there was no surge of enthusiasm for the party, as there was when Tony Blair captured the mood of the country in 1997.
And although it will be Starmer walking into 10 Downing Street as Britain’s next prime minister, it’s Farage’s Reform that end the campaign with the fabled political momentum.
Farage’s ragtag troop may have won only a handful of seats in the House of Commons, but the Reform vote share and breadth of its support will keep both Labour and Conservative strategists awake in the wee hours for years to come.
An upstart party pooper
Born from the ashes of UKIP and the Brexit Party less than six years ago, Reform’s devastating capacity to draw votes from the Conservatives was enough to blow up Sunak’s chances of remaining prime minister this time around.
But Farage’s party’s string of second-place finishes, particularly across traditionally Labour seats which fell to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, will give the incoming government the heebie-jeebies.
If Starmer fails to bring about the change and improve voters’ lives as he promises, who will Reform voters punish?
Farage was explicit about who he’ll be gunning for in the next election, which must be held by 2029. “We’re coming for Labour — be in no doubt about that,” he said in his victory speech in Clacton leisure center. “This is the first steps in something which is going to stun all of you.”
Labour will argue that Farage’s better-than-expected showing should not detract from the party’s extraordinary success in coming back from its worst-ever defeat less than five years ago to its greatest showing since 1997. And, indeed, it was a great victory.
If you’d told Starmer’s top team even a year ago that the governing Conservatives would crash to an abject defeat, losing two-thirds of their MPs, a string of ministers including a number of Cabinet ministers, and generally become a national laughing stock, they’d have scoffed.
Starmer could be forgiven for feeling elated after he turned around a party which had pretty much become unelectable under its former leader, hard-left Jeremy Corbyn.
Tories kicked out
But he can’t relax for too long. The vote was a lash of anger against a Tory party which, by the end, had proved venal and incompetent, so riven and ill-disciplined that dispatching it was almost a favor.
Fearful to the point of paranoia about losing again after 14 years in the wilderness, Starmer said so little about what he planned to do with the power he has finally won that he gave nothing in the way of inspiration. The electorate voted the Conservatives out; as the other main party in a (thus far) two-party system, Labour was not invited into the breach but slipped in by default.
And there are other slithers of alarm for Labour: Corbyn’s stunning victory as an independent in his seat of Islington North, despite being barred from standing for the party by Starmer for downplaying the stain of antisemitism on his watch; a vote share for an expelled candidate large enough to cost another Labour candidate a seat, allowing former Tory Leader Iain Duncan Smith to cling on. There were other losses too — two shadow Cabinet ministers fell to challengers from the left.
Yes, Keir Starmer is prime minister and, in Tony Blair’s words from 1997, a new dawn has broken. But rather than the warm sunshine his predecessor enjoyed, it’s a rather gray and chilly one today.
