Wandering through a local Cardiff park with my parents at some point in 1979, I spotted the then Prime Minister on the campaign trail and asked my father if I could get his autograph. The Prime Minister scrawled ‘Jim Call’ in my notebook and I promptly stuffed it in my pocket. I no longer have that scrap of paper that Jim Callaghan signed his name on for eight year old me, but I remember well his comment on the wider winds that sometimes sweep through politics every generation:
There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.
Callaghan was hit by such a shift in that election and it took the Labour Party almost two decades to recover politically and ultimately regain power. Margaret Thatcher won a big sea change victory and set off the era of economic neoliberalism that we’re still living through the long tail of.
Following the first General Election that I had any awareness of, I grew up on a drumbeat of disappointments with every turn of the electoral cycle. Thatcher comprehensively trounced Michael Foot’s ‘longest suicide note in history’ manifesto of 1983, following her last-gasp imperial war with Argentina in the South Atlantic, over the Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas.
Fast forwarding a moment, I was amongst the hippy hordes making their way back home from the Glastonbury Festival during some early 1990s summer, waiting at Bristol Temple Meads station for the train that would take me back home to Wales. Seeing a frail old man who seemed to have trouble walking waiting for the same train on the platform next to me, I offered to help him onto the train. As I helped him on, it dawned on me that the man was Michael Foot himself. Probably my second encounter with a Labour leader.
We sat together in the carriage for an hour, chatting about the state of the country under the Major administration and issues that were plaguing education at the time. I was still a university student at this point and he made for a fascinating companion. He got off at his station, Ebbw Vale, leaving me somewhat in wonder at the encounter I had just had. We would have become a very different country had he been made PM, though this was something that was never likely to happen.
I became increasingly more politically-aware during my teenage years, as the Thatcher government played out its earlier moves. Labour was taken over by a reforming Welshman who was determined to bring the party back closer towards the political centre ground. They nevertheless lost again in 1987, after Thatcher had ended much of Britain’s industrial base and created the more financialised economy and larger private sector that followed.
By 1992, I got my first vote in a General Election. Neil Kinnock was still Labour leader, John Major was presiding over an ever more rotten husk of a Conservative party, and a triumphalist Kinnock beamed on stage at a Labour campaign rally in Sheffield when it seemed inevitable that a long generation of Tory rule was finally about to come to an end.
It didn’t, and I had to live out the first half of my twenties — including the entirety of my undergraduate degree — under yet another Tory government. Major phased out the student grant and introduced the student loan, so I became one of the first generation of graduates to leave university in debt.
The sense of profound and deep disappointment with the election results was real, deep and long lasting. Growing up in Tory Britain had long felt like living in a national straitjacket, where so many of us were just on the wrong side to ever get a break or to experience a sense of hope that things could actually get better.
By 1997, though, they finally did get better.
A new leader of the Labour Party had continued the journey of making his party more electable within the British First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system whilst preparing for the possibility of power within the constraints that the Conservative government and their outriders in places like parts of the media placed on them. The election campaign included Blair’s Labour being criticised for choosing to continue Tory spending plans if it won power, adopting a so-called ‘Ming vase strategy’ of making an electoral offer bounded in caution, and framing their manifesto more around a series of pledges of what they would do if they got into government, rather than more concrete actions that could also be more easily criticised by their opponents while on the campaign trail.
I was 25 at the time of Blair’s victory, a quarter of a century old. At the time, on that long night of such sweet victory, it felt almost unreal that the moment I’d long dreamt of — an unremitting halt to Tory hegemony, swept out by another one of Callaghan’s sea changes — had finally come to pass.
At the time, I worked in an academic bookshop and not long after the election, a recap of the whole event was rushed out under the title ‘Were You Still Up For Portillo?’. Michael Portillo had been a Defence Secretary in Major’s government. He fulminated on conference stages about things like the fear that Britain’s S.A.S. supposedly struck into its enemies and was also talked about as a potential future Tory leader. I was indeed still up when Portillo was roundly defenestrated by the humble and seemingly mild-mannered Stephen Twigg. In fact, if I recall correctly, I stuck my head out of the lounge window in the flat I was living in at the time at hollered with joy when Portillo lost his seat. He wasn’t the only one either, as that Tory era finally came crashing down around our ears.
As thrilling as the sensation was of things getting better, they ultimately soured, as they tend to in politics. Princess Diana’s death a few months after the election shook the national mood that that been so lifted by the changing of the old guard. The new Labour government was also beset by problems domestic, like fuel protests and a return of Mad Cow Disease to the British countryside, and international, including the return of a Republican US President in a contested election where Blair chose to align closely to the eventual winner. Still, in the General Election of 2001, I gave the Labour Party another vote and played my part in Blair’s second landslide victory. Voting for a Labour government was the only real option in town, given the absence of alternatives for actual government.
Things still fell apart, though. The United States was hit by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Britain joined the US in launching a war on Afghanistan — that famous graveyard of empires — and Blair ultimately followed Bush into a disastrous invasion of Iraq which destabilised the Middle East in a myriad of ways.
I joined the millions of other citizens on the streets of London in the spring of 2003 — thought to have been Britain’s biggest ever protest march in terms of bodies on the streets — to make our voices heard and take a stand that we opposed Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq. Millions more were marching in cities all around the world as I stood in Hyde Park and listened to speeches by the Rev Jesse Jackson and Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn.
It was only my second ever protest march. The first one, in 1981, also ended up at the same final destination when I again joined my parents for more politics in the park and we marched against Thatcher and Reagan’s weapons amidst early 1980s fears of nuclear war. Leader of the HM Opposition, Michael Foot MP, was amongst the marchers that lay on the ground in unison and solidarity and fear when the symbolic klaxons blared around the park that day. Little did I know that a decade later or so, I would spend an hour with him on a train carriage, having both lived through the moment that was riddled with fears of nuclear war.
In the same way that none of us in Hyde Park on that day in 1981 caused British nuclear disarmament to happen, none of us in Hyde Park in 2003 stopped the Iraq War either. Street protest, often born of frustration, can provide validation of perspective through sheer force of numbers and raise the profile of an issue, but once a political decision has been taken, rare is the politician that is prepared to publicly change their mind. Tyrant Saddam Hussein was removed from power in Baghdad by coalition forces, but the invasion and subsequent occupation was as much of a disaster as the millions of global protesters had anticipated it to be.
The Iraq misadventure was one of the factors that led to me turning my back on the country I was born in and leaving it behind. Not the only reason, admittedly, but a big factor all the same. It turned out that vanquishing the Tories from power was not enough on its own to set the country in a net positive direction and that it was just as possible to experience profound disappointment with the political alternative to them.
Having struggled to get anything like a career off the ground following university and increasingly disillusioned by the turn that British politics had taken, I got on a plane bound for Tokyo’s Narita Airport in September 2003 to try a fresh start on the other side of the world. I stayed there and made that fresh start. By the time the next UK General Election came around in 2005, so immersed was I in exploring Japan and developing a better understanding of Asia that I didn’t even register for a postal vote and sat out playing a part in Blair’s third and final electoral victory. I eventually managed to settle my debts with The Student Loan Company, though.
In 2007, after a decade in power, Blair stepped down from his role as Prime Minister, was replaced by his Chancellor Gordon Brown, and the bookend to the ‘New Labour’ era started to come into view. The foundations of neoliberal capitalism were not strong, and soon after Brown came into power, the global economy started to experience a series of shocks that resulted in the biggest dip in global economic activity since the Great Depression of the previous century. As the new ‘Great Recession’ was unfolding, I also reached a fork in the road in Japan and ended up reluctantly taking the route back to Britain, amidst the most uncertain economic times I’d ever known.
Being the Prime Minister at the time, Brown was simultaneously responsible for playing a role in shoring up the economic system to avoid further collapse and was subsequently held culpable for supposedly playing a role in the collapse in the first place. Another election would be hard to stave off for long.
Mindful, perhaps, of a possible loss of power and with an eye on cementing his legacy, Brown gave an address at the 2009 Labour Party conference that listed some of the achievements the party had delivered during its surprisingly long time in power:
…the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Surestart, the Cancer Guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, devolution, civil partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the social chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the minimum wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act…
A significant evolution from the previous social order, then, spun out over a period of governments rather than a single election. Blair and Brown’s New Labour governments had both literally and politically bridged Britain’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their governments had acted as the political saviours against the old guard I’d cut my socio-economic teeth on, and the embodiment of some of my values in governmental power. They had also represented the realities of disappointment, disillusionment and despair when your political project falls apart and you lose faith in what was once the solution to your problems. For Iraq particularly, I felt that they had to be electorally punished, but it also felt like — after 13 years in power — it was time for another change. The trouble was, what to?
Brown ultimately bowed to the inevitable and called another General Election in 2010. I was back in the UK, but for the first time since I had been eligible to vote, I was not prepared to cast one for the Labour Party. I couldn’t bear the prospect of the most likely alternative — a return to Tory rule — but I couldn’t escape that feeling of the need to administer an electoral punishment for that biggest of errors, the Iraq War and the subsequent destabilisations that accompanied it. One vote against would not be felt by a party on the brink of losing power, but an aggregation of enough of them should be.
Tribalist voters in safe seats will always vote the same way. Unless you are one of these, when you cast a vote in an election, you generally do so on the basis that you’d hope for the candidate you put your mark by to win. If they don’t win, then at least you contribute towards a show of support. In 2010, I knew that I would regret not voting at all. Generations after generations had fought for an ever broader franchise and I’ve never wanted to disrespect that effort by not bothering. I wouldn’t vote Labour on this occasion. I could never vote Tory. I felt that a Green vote would be tantamount to a wasted one at that point, and I wasn’t prepared to mess up my ballot for the sake of sending a message. Without much heart in the decision I settled on in the ballot box, I voted for the local Liberal Democrat candidate. At least I think I did. Might have gone Green.
I don’t recall who became the MP for the constituency I was living in during the 2010 General Election, but I do recall that for the first time in my living memory, the result was not a FPTP conclusive victory for one side or the other. It was an election where the electorate pretty much said ‘none of the above’. Brown clung on for a short while as the horse trading for power got under way. In the end, Britain got its first coalition government since Churchill’s war ministry as the Liberal Democrats entered into an agreement with the Conservative Party.
Tory David Cameron became Prime Minister, with Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, becoming Deputy Prime Minister. Cameron had learned from the Tories’ long period in the political wilderness and, post-Blair, had looked to remodel his party as ‘compassionate Conservatives’. Although Clegg’s party might have taken some of the edge off the baser instincts of the Tories once back in power, little of that so-called compassionate conservatism was in evidence as Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne set about eviscerating the state. The new political paradigm ushered in was of austerity, the rationale being that ‘there was no money left’ after the financial crash, and the blame was laid squarely on Labour’s shoulders. The crash had happened on Labour’s watch, so they would inevitably be pointed to as culpable, whether that was fair or not or even true.
During this period, on a personal level, I both became a parent and finally ended up in a job where I felt I’d found my professional calling, as an Educational Technologist in a London university. Ageing into a profession was, in many ways, a relief after the fractiousness of my earlier career. The socio-political backdrop during this period, however, was bleak. Year after year, most aspects of British society that had previously been funded by tax revenue were cut from the government’s balance sheets, and the country saw a resulting crumbling of the social fabric. Food banks, non-profit organisations that distribute free food to those that cannot afford to feed themselves properly, saw huge growth spurts during the austerity years, as did a return of diseases associated with poverty thought to have been left behind in the Victorian era.
By then, the Labour Party was run by Ed Miliband, Brown’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who had overseen the introduction of the UK’s Climate Change Act. Miliband led the party into the next election, which took place in 2015. After five long years of austerity and a caustic referendum on Scottish independence, I’d hoped that the British electorate would punish the Coalition Government for what they had done to the country in the name of saving it, but to my horror, the electorate returned the first majority Tory government since John Major in 1992. What had been would continue to be, and I was back in the terribly familiar place of railing against a government I didn’t like but that I couldn’t do anything about.
To make things worse, and to my greater horror, flush from his apparent success at winning two referenda — one on reforming the electoral system and the other on Scottish secession from the British union — Prime Minister David Cameron decided on a third roll of the dice with another referendum.
I was two years old when Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC). The wall that had separated East and West Berlin since 1961 finally came down in the twilight of Margaret Thatcher’s time in power, and the logic of greater European harmonisation began to swell. By the time of the ’92 election in the UK, the EEC had grown to become a political union as much as an economic one and had morphed into the European Union (EU).
Where my parents had grown up in the aftermath of the long shadows of war across the continent, I was gifted Freedom of Movement as a young citizen of Europe. I spent chunks of time in the second half of the Nineties taking advantage of that freedom to move and roamed across swathes of continental Europe as a free man. Some of this was aided by the existence of the Eurostar, a train that could take passengers from London to Paris and which didn’t exist when I was born.
The building of the Channel Tunnel was a feat of engineering that could arguably be put in a similar category to the Moon Landing in terms of cooperative human ingenuity and which also required some serious co-operation between Britain and France. After more than a century of imagining the possibility of an undersea tunnel between the two countries, the building of it was initiated in 1986 when the Thatcher and Mitterrand governments signed the Treaty of Canterbury. They therefore showed that a Conservative British government was fully capable of collaborating with a Socialist French one.
On one such trip to the continental mainland, I found myself standing next to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the gents of the Kent terminals of Eurostar. By then, Kinnock had been made a European Commissioner by Tony Blair, a reward perhaps for having laid the groundwork for Blair’s pathway to power. One typically doesn’t strike up conversation with major public figures when peeing at a urinal so I refrained from saying hello and mentioning my earlier encounters with Callaghan and Foot. I did ponder to myself though on the fact and the circumstances of a third encounter with a Labour leader.
While many of us young Brits had made the most of membership, the country also saw similar moves from other young Europeans moving to make better lives for themselves in the UK. A greater diversity of languages could be heard on British streets, the quality of coffee improved in the country, and in some ways, Britain became more ‘Europeanised’. Much like the future described by William Gibson though, it just wasn’t very well distributed.
Blair’s government had arguably been able to avoid redistributing too much tax revenue on to the parts of the country that had been hollowed out by Thatcher’s deindustrialisation zeal because part of our fee for EU membership saw returns from the European Social Fund (ESF). The ESF was a funding mechanism dedicated to improving social cohesion and economic well-being across the regions of the Union, a financial mechanism necessary given the harmonisational needs of such geopolitical events as the post-Cold War reunification of Germany and the integration of former Soviet bloc states into the Union.
From forcing Britain to adhere to higher environmental standards to improving our social infrastructure, EU membership acted as an almost unspoken bulwark against the greater excesses of several shades of British government, who in turn rarely ever really made the case for why membership mattered. Membership of the club was therefore something that rumbled along in the background for most people.
Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
The Conservative Party had long featured constituencies of Eurosceptics in their ranks that disapproved of Britain’s membership of the EU. In order to quell increasing threats from his rightward flanks, in 2016 Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership, on a simple leave/remain basis. This introduced a new term into the national lexicon — Brexit, a contraction of British exit from European Union membership. The Eurosceptics became Brexiteers, invigorated by the possibility of what had once seemed impossible.
Cameron naturally assumed that he would win this one in the same way that he’d seemingly won the other two referenda, and so paid little attention to the fact that the citizenry had rarely had the positive case for EU membership made to them and that, following six years of austerity economics, there was a lot of anger around at the state of the country. Cameron lost the referendum and resigned the next day as Prime Minister, a captain walking away from a ship sinking into a sea of chaos.
Waking up the next day to that result was even worse than waking up to an election result that hadn’t gone the way you’d wanted it to. The results had been very close, with 52% of those that participated opting for leave and 48% opting for remain. This would create new political identities that cut across traditional party lines, that of ‘leavers’ and ‘remainers’.
The key question would be how this simple yet inconclusive message would be interpreted. I’d disagreed with the very premise of the referendum in the first place. The simplicity of the question gave voters like me no means of expressing any dissatisfaction I actually had with some of the worst aspects of the regional bloc. Furthermore, at least with an election, you can usually throw the scoundrels out the next time one comes around. With a referendum framed in this way, the result was likely irreversible.
Following Cameron’s resignation, his Home Secretary Theresa May became Prime Minister. She had been best known for overseeing what was described as a ‘hostile environment’ that was designed to reduce immigration figures by as much as possible. Instead of taking the inconclusive decision by the electorate as a steer for a conciliatory approach on a political way forward, May interpreted that 52% (of those that voted) as a mandate for the hardest form of Brexit possible, to purge as many aspects of European Union membership as she could from British national life. A British attempt at unscrambling the European omelette.
I’d grown up an English kid in a Welsh school that took family holidays in Scotland and who had returned to England for university. I never quite fitted in any of the places I found myself. First of all, I tend to consider myself more British than English or Welsh, but when Britishness was so strongly associated with the excesses of the Tory hegemonic era of my youth, Britishness wasn’t enough as a form of personal identity. In some cases, it was even an embarrassment.
I managed to make peace with an America I’d grown up recoiling from due to its Reaganite associations after spending some time living in Florida (of all places) during the Clinton era. However, it was with the freedom to roam across the continent that I’d been conferred the legal right to do where I started to feel my sense of self growing to be of more than just the one country.
By the time that I was ready to leave Japan, I’d spent short amounts of time in Africa and South America, and had longer stretches of familiarisation with different parts of Asia too. I was British-born, but felt globally minded. I’d made a conscious and deliberate choice to become a ‘citizen of the world’. Such a thing is only really a state of mind rather than a particular legal status, but I’d suggest that our mindsets are much more what drive our actions than our birth or adopted nationalities.
At the Tory Party conference that year, with May’s star in the ascendant, she gave a speech that included the following line:
If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.
Looking at the rest of May’s conference speech, that line was clearly more intended to be targeted at the rootless liberal elites of global capitalism than at square peg individuals searching for a sense of self. It nevertheless felt like a personal attack. The Prime Minister of the country I was born in was telling me that I had no validity as a British person. Her approach in government was very much to embody the slim result in the referendum as a thumping mandate for a virulent and ideological form of nationalist government that came down very much in favour of one side and acted to the almost total exclusion of alternative points of view. Any other views were seen as coming from ‘enemies of the people’, an almost fascistic valorisation of a subset of a subset of the population to the exclusion of all others.
In early 2017, she enacted the process of Britain leaving its membership of the EU by ‘triggering’ Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, thus beginning the process of Brexit. Shortly after, and to shore up her hand in negotiations, she called another General Election.
By then, the Labour Party was led by the Islington North MP that had spoken out against his own party leader’s invasion of Iraq back in 2003, Jeremy Corbyn. Serving as Corbyn’s Shadow Brexit Secretary was the MP that had been elected to represent the London seat of Holborn and St Pancras in 2015, former barrister Sir Keir Starmer. Like me, and indeed like May herself, Starmer had voted for Remain in the referendum. Unlike me, Starmer was given the job of shadowing the ministers that were tasked with extricating the British egg from the European omelette, and therefore effectively having to advocate for Brexit. We’ll come back to this point later.
Despite elements of tribalism in my voting behaviour, I was always somewhat conflicted about Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. On one hand, some of the I suppose left wing populist messaging he espoused was very appealing. I would often find myself agreeing with his diagnosis of the country’s ills and approving of some of the solutions that he would propose for them. I felt that the party needed to atone for the serious sins of the Iraq War, and as leader, Corbyn offered a fulsome apology for what had happened on behalf of the Labour Party. Having made his opposition to the war clear at the time, once he was leader of the party, he was prepared to offer that atonement that would allow more of us voter deserters back into the tent. He oversaw a groundswell of enthusiasm amongst younger people and at one point, made the UK Labour Party the largest political organisation in Europe in terms of membership.
On the other hand, I could see how much was stacked against him in terms of his treatment by such establishment bodies as much of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the British media. I could see that he was quite dogmatic at times in his position on many things, and he seemed to have a poor grasp on leadership and its role in holding a political coalition together. And probably worst of all, given the particular moment that we were in, he seemed to equivocate in his views on the benefits of Britain’s membership of the EU. The referendum had forced everyone off the fence, and Corbyn always seemed a little too much like he wouldn’t have any particular objection to Brexit itself as an idea. Perhaps it might pave the way for a less capitalistic Europe? Perhaps a ‘left-wing exit’ or ‘Lexit’ might encourage a domino effect of Europe becoming more socialist?
May went into the 2017 election in the ascendant and ended up having such a poor campaign that she threw away her inherited majority and had to broker an expensive confidence-and-supply arrangement with the rather fervently-minded Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland. Corbyn didn’t lead his party to electoral victory either, but had a positive enough result that it was interpreted by some as enough of a near thing that maybe one more push was all that was needed for the most left wing potential government in my lifetime to take power.
The rest of May’s premiership and much of the prevailing political discourse of the time was characterised by division, rancour and stasis. She faced so much opposition to whatever she tried to do politically that she ended up losing vote after vote in the House of Commons and she managed to achieve very little, other than the initiation of Brexit itself. In early 2019, I joined millions of other people at the ‘Put It To The People’ march, my third ever protest march (all of which had been through the nation’s capital) which called for a second referendum of the Brexit question.
Some accounts had this march down as the biggest in British history, surpassing even the historic one against the Iraq War. It certainly felt momentous in scale, as each of us formed part of a massive river gushing through Central London in support of maintaining closer ties with our continental neighbours and of greater tolerance for diversity of opinion in the British body politic. Who knows whether this groundswell of mass Europhilia contributed to Labour putting its shoulder behind the wheel of a proposed second referendum later that year, but that’s what they ultimately did, even with equivocal Corbyn at the top.
In the summer of 2019, however, May finally gave up the ghost of trying to take the political momentum in her intended direction of travel amidst complete political gridlock and Britain’s second ever female Prime Minister agreed to step down.
Having incidentally found my professional calling during the tenure of the Coalition government, I become a manager during the May era. If I map my career path alongside the period of Tory return to government, I’d done well enough for myself at last despite the state of the rest of the country. There has been a view common in many contexts that people are generally more left-wing and progressively minded when they are younger, but they become more conservative in their thinking as they age and accrue assets or capital. Despite hitting managerial ranks on a career path and being a mortgage holder as I reached middle age, there was next to no chance at all that I’d become more conservative in my voting behaviour as I aged, particularly given the state that the political expression of conservative thinking had left things in.
After austerity and the Brexit referendum, I thought to myself — hoped, really — that things had reached a floor and couldn’t get any worse. I was, of course, very wrong. There were several depths yet to plumb.
May had, somewhat bizarrely, given the role of Foreign Secretary to Boris Johnson. Johnson was the shambolic-looking character that had been one of the major fronts of the referendum campaign and who had spent much of his career as a newspaper columnist that had made his reputation in the right-wing press telling various untruths about the EU. In one of those circumstances that you just instinctively knew would be an absolute car crash of a situation, he ran to replace May as Leader of the Conservative Party and thus become Prime Minister. Worse than just running, he also won too.
As Prime Minister, Johnson also faced the same opposition and gridlock that May had faced and opted to unlawfully prorogue (suspend) Parliament in what many viewed as an attempt to push through a particularly extreme form of Brexit without any of the Parliamentary scrutiny that had prevented some attempt at a more balanced political enactment of the referendum result.
In the September of that fractious year, I had my fourth encounter with a Labour leader when I wandered along to a climate change protest outside Islington Town Hall during an office lunch break. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was the local MP and always keen to represent a cause on the streets, Jeremy Corbyn was amongst the assembled protestors. If I remember correctly, he addressed the crowd with a message that was hard to disagree with regarding something or other like the dangers of unabated fossil fuel use, and then left the stage for another speaker. With a bike helmet on his head and pushing his transport through the crowd as he tried to exit for another constituency appointment, people kept stopping him to talk to him as he tried to leave the place.
I didn’t want to approach him as one of those uncritical followers that had amassed in the crowds at his rallies, but given that he was Leader of the Opposition and that Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, I knew who I’d prefer in Number 10 of the two. I approached Corbyn, introduced myself as someone working at the local university, and shook his hand, wishing him ‘Good luck’. He was going to need more than luck to get past all that was stacked against him, and my equivocal support wasn’t going to amount to anything in terms of shifting the dial in his favour. It seemed like the right thing to do though, in the circumstances.
In December 2019, just as the first cases of a mysterious new highly-contagious disease was being reported in Wuhan, China, Johnson called a snap election in order to try and secure a mandate for the form of Brexit that he was trying to enact and thus ‘get Brexit done’ (as was the apocryphal slogan that would come to define the campaign). Undeniably exhausted by the national divisions of the past few years over the Europe question, I could certainly understand the appeal of a message of moving past this particular era where nothing else could be done politically. I understood too that many of my fellow citizens had reservations about the prospect of Corbyn as Prime Minister, some of them deeply serious and profound.
In my view, though, the prospect of an unrestrained Johnson, forcing through the most extreme form of Brexit and reigning triumphant over the body politic was a far more heinous prospect than either of those two other options of ongoing attrition over the referendum or a Corbyn premiership. It was, however, this prospect that confronted me and the rest of the country as I awoke the day after the 2019 General Election to find that Johnson had secured a landslide victory with a majority in the House of Commons of 80 seats. Corbyn’s Labour Party sunk to its worst electoral result in terms of parliamentary seats since 1935.
Boris Johnson, a lazy and entitled man who nevertheless seemed to crave being liked, remodelled the government with a cabinet of bootlickers that was purged of any alternative points of view to his own. Despite a large majority, the prospect of a potential long stay in power, a government that would do his bidding and the Brexit wars seemingly behind him, he nevertheless seemed to show very little interest in actually governing. The Prime Minister snuck off into the recesses of his grace-and-favour retreats to work through a divorce and supposedly get on with a book he’d been rumoured to be writing on Shakespeare. Britain was therefore left in the rudderless hands of a group of inexperienced and incompetent sycophants hellbent on one particular ideological goal when a once-in-a-century crisis enveloped the whole world early in the following year.
When the signs started hitting in early 2020 that this was going to be something big, I was at an international trade fair in Amsterdam, running a workshop on academics as holograms at an educational technology conference. All the big Asian manufacturers had started pulling out of the event, the stalls that were there had started to make antiseptic hand gel available to any visitor that stopped by, and a new greeting was emerging, of bumping elbows rather than shaking hands.
In Europe, the Covid-19 pandemic hit Italy first, and like many other Brits, I found myself scrolling continually through social media slack-jawed in horror at the stories of social crisis and rising death tolls in Italian hospitals. Just like the Chinese had been doing, Italy started to lock down its cities and confine its populations to their homes in a desperate attempt to curtail the spread of the virus. Back at work, I readied the rest of the department I was part of to move all of our operations onto the Microsoft Teams platform I was already using with my own team and told my colleagues to prepare for the possibility of the university we worked at being temporarily closed down.
What would be the worst possible government to have in place at a time of such desperate crisis as this? It turned out to be the one that we had. Johnson had no desire at all to order a lockdown and therefore potentially save lives, and instead spent much of the early days and weeks trying to brazen out a highly contagious novel pathogen for which there was then no known cure. The man who just wanted to be Top Dog and liked for it, but not be in a position to have to make big, difficult decisions ultimately found himself having to confine the population to their homes and make an awful lot of very difficult decisions.
The day after I returned from Amsterdam, Johnson appointed a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. The previous holder of the post had refused to agree to the sacking of all his advisors at the Treasury and have them replaced with ones selected by 10 Downing Street, so the PM replaced him with somebody supposedly more supine. Five weeks into the new job, that new Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, which provided grants to employers to pay up to 80% of wages and staff costs for employees stuck at home. This furlough scheme effectively paid those that could no longer go into offices and other places of work to stop work and stay at home until such time as it was safe to lift the lockdowns. The scheme reportedly had a total cost of £70 billion. It was not for the likes of me and my colleagues, though, as we had seven days to prepare for moving an entire university’s operations online and then several months in our living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens trying to keep our institutions going whilst still operating entirely online.
Just four days after ordering the first national lockdown of the pandemic, Johnson contracted the disease himself and was admitted to an intensive care unit. Britain found itself with one of those aforementioned sycophants accidentally at the helm and for a brief moment, the prospect of a brand new Prime Minister dying in office a mere few months after a historic election win. The new leader of the Labour Party, Corbyn’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, was announced while Britain was under its first lockdown, about two weeks after the announcement of the furlough scheme. Whatever his original campaign platform might have promised, Starmer found it hard to do much other than support the government from opposition as it navigated its way through the country’s biggest crisis since the Second World War.
As the lockdown succeeded in limiting the spread of the virus and the restrictions started to lift, so the first serious scandals began to emerge from the Johnson administration. The first public vaccinations against Covid-19 began in the December of that same year and so the Johnson government had something to mask their failings with and claimed great credit for nationwide vaccination programmes. The scandals continued to mount, however, and a year later, reports began to emerge of the government and Conservative Party staff holding social gatherings during the period of heightened national restrictions on any forms of socialisation.
It’s hard to even imagine the absolute chaos that 2022 saw politically, now that it’s in the rear view mirror. Essentially, much of the year — while there was officially still a pandemic on — consisted of scandal after scandal emerging from the government and minister after minister resigning. Public anger towards Johnson mounted further, and in July of that year, he finally agreed to resign (through gritted teeth, of course). By then, an astonishing 62 members of the government had resigned, including Johnson’s furlough Chancellor, Rishi Sunak.
The World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 as a public health emergency of international concern between January 30th 2020 and May 5th 2023, by which time it had finally become possible to downgrade the status of the pandemic. Between these two dates, just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate. By comparison, there were around 70,000 civilian deaths listed in the UK during World War II, largely due to German bombing raids during the Blitz. To spell that out more starkly, during the roughly three year crisis of the pandemic, more than three times as many civilians died as during the roughly six year crisis of the last world war.
Johnson was replaced as Prime Minister in the September of 2022 by his Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Truss, promoted in a series of Cabinet positions far beyond her capabilities, was not one of the ministers that had attempted to display a scintilla of integrity by resigning from his government. She got the top job after beating Rishi Sunak in the contest to replace Johnson. She’d not been one of the brightest sparks as it was in a terminally dull Cabinet, but surely after the catastrophic Johnson era, the country would be able to turn a corner? Right?
Wrong.
September 8th 2022, two days after she had appointed Truss as Prime Minister, Queen Elizabeth II died.
Probably my earliest memory of Elizabeth as Head of State was of attending a street party at six years old in celebration of her Silver Jubilee, a year and a half ahead of the Winter of Discontent that is far hazier in my memory banks. Unbeknowst to me, the Sex Pistols performed ‘God Save The Queen’ on a boat on the Thames the same day. A few years later, I refused to cite the Scout’s pledge to ‘do my duty by God and the Queen’ at the end of my first ever Cub Scouts meeting on the grounds that I didn’t believe in either of them. I can’t really claim a direct link between the Pistols on the river and my Cub Scout refusal, but I’ve clearly never been that much of a royalist. I conceded though that she played a notable symbolic role for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Elizabeth II had provided a veneer of stability when heading up a country that had undergone several massive and profound changes during her reign — from the devastations of WWII when she’d been a young princess, the gradual then sudden loss of empire following the war, the social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic ones of the 1980s, the recent Brexit wars and the devastations of the pandemic.
Then, suddenly, a moment as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning came to pass and an old lady died. Nothing changed and everything changed as the passing of one of the most famous people in the world led to what I dubbed at the time, a ‘hyperevent’. The spotlight of the world briefly shone on Britain. Politics was suspended yet again as the nation dusted off its well worn and much practised plans for the moment when ‘London Bridge has fallen’ (as was the supposed establishment code name for her passing).
Truss was the fifteenth and final British Prime Minister to serve under Elizabeth II, who started with Churchill in his second run as the head of the government. The Queen’s funeral proceedings and of course the succession of her eldest son to the throne took all the oxygen out of the first couple of weeks of Truss’s premiership. Then, politics resumed on September 23rd when Britain’s first Black Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced what was referred to as a ‘mini budget’. Funded by borrowing, it consisted of massive tax cuts in multiple directions and was supposedly intended to stimulate economic growth. More like economic shock therapy.
The pound fell to its lowest ever rate against the dollar. Interest rates, used to hovering around the low single figures, shot up to over 10%. Crisis measures were enacted by the Bank of England to arrest the risk of wider economic collapse. There was much international criticism levelled at the Truss government, including from the International Monetary Fund and US President, Joe Biden. Truss later dismissed Kwarteng and replaced him with Cameron’s unpopular Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. The damage, however, had been done.
I mentioned above how in life I’d reached a stage in life where a pollster might have expected me to be a Tory voter — middle aged, middle class, a home owning manager in a professional role. Although I was furious about the implementation of Brexit taking away the freedoms I had accrued in my youth and the implementation of pandemic mitigation measures taking away the freedoms I’d not even realised I’d had as an adult, neither of them had personally hit my pocket in major ways in the same ways that austerity, Brexit and Covid had directly affected millions of other Britons. The previous Tory governments had yet to raid my pockets directly. However, I was due to remortgage my house the following year and with the shooting up of interest rates, it seemed that my luck would run out. Liz Truss would be the Tory PM to force me into financial difficulty, on top of the rest of the state of the country.
She experienced large falls in public support. In some polling, she became cited as the most unpopular PM in British history. Further governmental chaos ensued as a result of the mini budget, including more ministerial resignations. Tabloid newspaper The Daily Star put up a live stream of a webcam focused on a head of lettuce and invited viewers to speculate whether Truss would resign before the lettuce wilted and she would thus be ‘outlasted by a lettuce’.
Truss resigned in effective disgrace on October 20th after just 49 days in office as Prime Minister. She became Britain’s shortest ever serving PM, surpassing George Canning’s 119 days. Canning only held the record because he died in office. She was succeeded in the role four days later by Boris Johnson’s furlough Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and had indeed been outlasted by a lettuce. And within the period of one party’s time in power, Britain had its fifth Conservative Prime Minister.
Delivering his first speech on the steps of Downing Street, Sunak promised that:
This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.
Given the track record of his four predecessors, it was a bold claim.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected 44th President of the United States. Obama became the leader of a country with imperialism, genocide, slavery and racial segregation in its origin story. He was described as America’s first Black President, a historic outcome that many people never expected to see happen, at least within their lifetimes. With the historical facts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Civil War having been fought over ending slavery, the conditions were there for America to one day seek some sort of redemption in elevating a Black person to the highest office in the land.
At its height, the British Empire was the largest empire in human history, with the colony of India being described at the time as ‘the Jewel in the Crown’. Although Britain obviously played a major and significant role in the Atlantic Slave Trade, some might argue that, overall, Britain’s relationship with the Indian subcontinent had an even greater presence within and upon the fabric of the nation that the Triangular Trade did. This would have applied during colonial rule but perhaps even more so after Indian independence.
I often wondered to myself during the Obama Presidency what the British equivalent would be, when the first non-white face would ascend to the status of Prime Minister, and ended up concluding that it would more likely be somebody of Indian than African heritage, meaning Indian in the historically broadest sense of the term.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first Hindu leader and non-white Prime Minster held the role between October 2022 and July 2024. Now that it is over and for the record, what was his premiership like? Well, for starters, he was no Barack Obama. The integrity, professionalism and accountability that he promised on the steps of Downing Street were in short supply. When he took over from Truss, the Russian war on Ukraine was already in full swing but the Israel-Hamas war was yet to kick off. Britain’s cost-of-living crisis that had seemingly straddled two decades ground on.
Sunak was Britain’s fifth consecutive Tory Prime Minister and the party had become a rotten husk by then, just like it had in the dog days of the Major era, whatever Sunak’s reported intentions might have been. As the newspapers were fond of noting, due to his career as a banker for Goldman Sachs and having also married into great wealth, he was supposedly richer than the King. While food bank usage and child poverty remained stubbornly high, Sunak showed a predilection for helicopter travel, even for short distances.
While he did manage to negotiate a slightly better deal with the EU on adjustments to the post-Brexit Northern Ireland Protocol that made up the Windsor Framework and oversaw the long-stalled re-establishment of Northern Ireland’s Assembly at Stormont, his government also fixated on a plan to send all asylum seekers that has arrived on small boats over the English Channel to the East African country of Rwanda.
The so-called ‘Rwanda Plan’ was framed as a deterrent to discourage the wretched of the Earth from taking part in dangerous people-trafficked journeys across the busiest sea lane in the world. His government passed the Illegal Migration Act to detain and remove those that tried to arrive in the country in this way, despite Britain being a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention that recognises the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. His government also passed the Safety of Rwanda Act, which tried to claim via statute that Rwanda was a safe place to send asylum seekers to, despite the UK’s Supreme Court having found that the East African country was not a safe place to send such people to.
Sunak’s government tried to legislate against reality itself, which is fairly symptomatic of how mad the Tory party had gone by then. And under him, net migration reached all-time highs.
If we were to make a list similar to Gordon Brown’s conference claims of New Labour’s achievements, it might have gone something like this: industrial disputes and strikes across the economy, Tory wipeouts in the 2023 and 2024 local elections, a Cabinet of deadbeats, more sleaze and corruption scandals, a shrinking economy, binning Net Zero, being forced to attend COP27 against his will, scrapping HS2, insisting on compulsory Maths till 18, bringing David Cameron back as Foreign Secretary, the closures of schools and other public buildings due to crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
Sunak was partly blamed for the school closures as he had reduced the funding available for school repairs during his time as Chancellor. It’s quite a list and this was only really over about a year and a half as PM. His party were consistently around 20 points behind in the polls. It became increasingly clear for anyone that wanted to see that the government has given up on governing. The Tory party, back in power for 14 long years, had reached its end game as ‘the natural party of government’ and this left many people hanging on in quiet desperation — as is the English way — for when the moment would come that these people could be electorally punished and driven from power.
Power was very clearly shifting towards the Labour Party as the only viable next government and Kier Starmer’s Labour took the mantle on of government-in-waiting with ruthlessness and precision.
Earlier this year, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves was set to appear at the annual Mais lecture in a theatre at the place I call my day job. Out of curiousity, I decided to turn up to listen and watch. Sunak himself had given an earlier Mais lecture when still Chancellor and the lecture itself is a staple event in the calendar that informs the interface between academia, the public and the banking and finance sectors that so dominate the British economy. This made it an interesting event to observe how sectors such as banking, economics and journalism would behave in the company of the likely next holder of the levers of the British economy.
For Reeves, it was evidently a big bucket list item on her route to power and she was clearly well prepared. She cited the economists that she needed to pepper the speech with as citations for credibility and acknowledged her predecessors at both the lectern and at the helm of the Treasury. Her performance was polished, albeit rather wooden, as she traded her gaze on the audience between the two perspex autocues that flanked her lectern like wing mirrors. She rarely smiled, except at the points where it was fitting to hint at a dash of character.
Should she become the next Chancellor, the first female one at that, she would have an unenviably poor fiscal inheritance and she needed the audience to be aware of this. Nevertheless, she couldn’t allow the message to be solely one of gloom as she spoke of ‘economic growth in an age of insecurity’.
Fittingly perhaps, for the post-Johnson era, Reeves’ Mais lecture was somewhat ‘cakeist’ in its outlook. Britain could and indeed must have economic growth to get us out of the hole that we’re in, but it can’t come from the largesses provided for by other Labour governments that had had the Marshall Plan, increased taxation or EU membership to fall back on. It would come from growing the economy with the support of private enterprise, yet with more of a social safety net than the untrammelled neoliberal version of capitalist Britain had previously permitted.
It was a fine line to tread, to be fair, and I couldn’t really see how she would have been able to give anything that different in terms of messaging, in the circumstances. But it was also hard to see any suggestions of sunlight in her foresights. This would pretty much be the message that Labour carried through the election campaign that was to come.
After endless speculation throughout the year, Labour consistently holding a strong double digit lead in the polls and a government running into the ground on an empty tank, on May 22 2024 Sunak finally bowed to the inevitable and called a General Election, for July 4. Yes, on American Independence Day.
As is customary for these events, he made the announcement to the waiting press at a lectern outside Downing Street. What was most surprising was that at exactly the point of his making the announcement, it was raining heavily across London. Bizarrely, he persisted with making his announcement in the rain, and so Sunak got progressively more soaked. To make matters worse for him, the anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray had stationed himself at the gates of Downing Street with a portable PA and was blasting out the D:Ream hit ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ in the background, partially drowning out Sunak’s attempt to deliver a positive spin on his government’s record through the rain.
I’d briefly met Bray on the ‘Put It To The People’ march and had my photo taken with him in an encounter that lasted about as long as my autograph gathering one with Jim Callaghan had been. Bray’s voice was about as consistent, persistent and loud an anti-Brexit voice as you could get, and he was no less loud on that day too.
Politics is as much about optics as it is about policies. The D:Ream song had soundtracked Tony Blair’s large electoral victory in 1997 and had become synonymous with a moment of Labour landslide overturning a long period of Tory hegemony. The optics of this election campaign thus got off to a terrible start for Sunak and the Tory party. Funnily enough though, they actually got worse after that.
Thinking that he was being backdropped by symbols of British manufacturing power, he gave an interview in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, where he was asked by the media if he was captaining a sinking ship. Then, two days after calling the election, Sunak announced that some form of a return to mandatory National Service would be included in the Tory offer to the electorate. This went down about as well as you might imagine it would have done, given the extent to which young people have struggled in so many areas of life under Tory rule.
A couple of weeks later, Sunak torpedoed his own chances of remaining Prime Minister even further. Although Britain may no longer be a country that expects its young people to do mandatory military service, it is still very much a country that trades on the mythology of its history during World War II. 2024 marked the 80th anniversary of Operation Neptune, more commonly known as the D-Day landings. Many world leaders attended the commemorations in Normandy, with both Sunak and Starmer amongst the attending dignitaries.
While Starmer, Leader of the Opposition, managed to use the occasion to meet and be photographed with both Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and King Charles III, Sunak decided to leave the event early in order that he could get back to Britain to record an interview with ITV that wouldn’t be broadcast for several days.
Talk about not reading the room. In an official photograph that emerged from the day, Sunak’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the former PM, was depicted alongside US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, rather than have the actual British PM himself completing the line-up. Sunak ended up publically apologising for ‘leaving D-Day early’ on three separate occasions.
The gaffes continued, and even morphed into a scandal that emerged by mid-June. At first one then ultimately dozens of Conservative officials were reported to the Gambling Commission on the grounds that they had allegedly placed insider bets based on confidential information. Whether accurate or not, it nevertheless added to the government’s electoral malaise and their diminishing changes of remaining in power.
A record number of MPs found themselves sniffing the prevailing winds and opted to stand down from their seats rather than face a very public defeat on election night. These included former PM Theresa May, former cabinet ministers Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Ben Wallace, Nadhim Zahawi, Kwasi Kwarteng and Michael Gove. My local MP, the man who had once been campaign manager for Andrea Leadsom’s leadership bid and who’d presided over what had once been a pretty safe Tory seat, also decided it was ‘time to do something new’.
There was even talk in some circles of a ‘Canada-style defeat’, which referenced the 1993 Canadian election where the ruling Conservative party went from a majority control of the Parliament to a mere two seats in one election. What a delight that could be here!
As for Labour’s electoral campaign, the Ming vase was brought out of storage again and oh so very delicately carried — with kid gloves and bubble wrapped plenty of times over — to the edge of the finish line until it was possible to acknowledge a win, but only once abundantly clearly on the other side of that line.
As ever and no matter the leader, Labour still had significant proportions of the media structurally set against them and ossified perceptions from significant portions of the electorate that a vote for Labour was a vote to remove the money from your own pocket, whether you had any in there or not. FPTP also sets the parameters of an election too, forcing a party to be a broad church but therefore also to try and by all things to all people. Or at least as many of them as they need to get over the threshold of power. This makes a clarity of message quite difficult, and even contradictory at times.
Like generals and their wars, politicians often tend to fight the last election rather than the one in front of them. Starmer had to contend with taking his party from a historic defeat to the corridors of power within one Parliament. It would have been a tough ask of any leader, and he appears to be a leader dogmatic in pursuit of his goals rather than nimble in that pursuit. This meant a ruthless determination on the task ahead, which was to win power and supplant the Tories as the government. It meant that no risks could be taken with the strategy. It also meant accepting some of the framing that had been placed around him and his party.
‘Labour can’t be trusted with your money’, so every effort had to be made to reassure voters that this wasn’t the case. ‘Brexit is done and reopening the conversation would risk alienating pro-Brexit voters and dividing the country again’, so a potential Labour would need to continue with keeping the EU at arm’s length and give no hint of a warm rapprochement. ‘Labour is institutionally antisemitic’, so standing firmly and uncritically with Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7th would need to be the default position, even when Israel’s actions in Gaza demanded a more nuanced support, at the very least. ‘Labour wastes money on all this green stuff’, so action on the urgency of the climate crisis would need to be deferred in favour of more electorally palatable actions, when nothing less than a complete rethink of society is what is called for.
The election campaign then was one of endurance. Of waiting out whatever mad thing the Tories would throw at the wall in the hope that something would stick. And of waiting out Labour’s timidity and absence of being prepared to actually tell any inspiring stories of where they wanted to take the country.
There are times, though, when a national mood takes hold and almost nothing will shift it. If this election was to be about anything, it was to ‘get the Tories out’. After 14 years of austerity, political and social divisions, corruption, demonisation of entire social groups, economic misadventures, attritional culture wars, the cost of living crisis, and the unavoidable sense that nothing worked any more (including government itself), then it was clearly time for a change.
Handily, Labour electoral slogan in 2024 consisted of just that one word — ‘Change’. If you offer change and people vote for change, then at least you can’t be that surprised if change is what is delivered.
Come the day itself and remembering that one glorious night in my mid twenties when I was still up for Portillo and witnessed the whole Tory facade I’d grown up under come crashing down, I was determined not to miss this particular moment either. I took the day after off work, voted early, then following a working day in London, came home and plonked myself in front of as many screens as I had access to and immersed myself in the sweet balm of Tory annihilation.
Sunak’s party, which in its original form was founded in 1834, experienced the largest electoral defeat in their history. They were reduced to 121 Parliamentary seats, suffering a loss of 252 seats in total. These losses included 12 Cabinet ministers, the right-wing caricature Jacob Rees-Mogg, all of the party’s seats in Wales, and even that of former Prime Minister Liz Truss.
At just after 05:00 the following morning, Sunak conceded defeat and the BBC pivoted to footage of Starmer surrounded by a crowd of mostly young faces at a gathering at the Tate Modern, New Labour’s museum temple to 20th Century modern art. The BBC declared that Labour had won the 2024 General Election. The British political pendulum had swung once again in the opposite direction and again delivered one of Jim Callaghan’s generational sea changes.
The scale of Labour’s victory, however thinly spread it might have been, at least gives a likely degree of certainty to the next five years that has been highly absent under Tory rule, given the size of their parliamentary majority. Whatever comes next will be whatever comes next, but the long and acrimonious era of Tory rule is finally over. End of an era. And not before time too.
This post was originally intended to be an account of staying up on one election night to see the televising of a changing of the guard in the halls of power. It has, however, ended up becoming something quite different — more like a personal political memoir than an account of a night to remember.
It tells the tale of my own political viewpoints, alignments, experiences and preferences set against almost half a century of British politics, including my personal encounters with four leaders of the Labour Party. In the years to come, I won’t be able to say that I was ‘still up for Truss’ because I’d fallen asleep on the couch at the moment she lost her seat, but I was at least still up for Rees-Mogg. And if you’ve managed to make it this far in reading the post, thank you for your attention in making it to the end.
What this post isn’t going to be is a critique of the party’s time in government as well, which has been mixed thus far but on balance, good enough in the circumstances. Starmer’s government may not be my ideal one, but it was the one most likely to supplant the Tories and is the one that we’ve got. It is therefore the one that any of us who want better from our country are going to have to work with.
A better Britain won’t be built in a day, and there is much work to be done. So let’s get to it…
