Labour’s Potemkin landslide

Something pretty big is missing from Labour’s historic landslide: the voters. Keir Starmer has won 63 per cent of the seats on just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the smallest vote share of any modern PM. Lower than any of the (many) pollsters predicted. So Labour in 2024 managed just 1.6 percentage points higher than the Jeremy Corbyn calamity in 2019 – and less than Corbyn managed in 2017. ‘But for the rise of the Labour party in Scotland,’ says Professor John Curtice, ‘we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.’ And that’s on the second-lowest turnout in democratic history. So where, then, is the supposed Starmer tsunami?

There certainly has been a Tory meltdown. Their vote share dropped from 44 to 24 per cent – by far the lowest in the party’s history. But remarkably, almost none of this seems to have gone to Labour. It mainly went to parties that had no chance of winning seats outright (like Reform) which makes Labour a beneficiary. But the level of enthusiasm for Labour is – well, let’s look at the share of the vote claimed by election-winning parties.

You can take this chart back to 1832 and see that Starmer has a lower vote share than any UK prime minister in the democratic era. He has won a landslide majority with a significantly smaller vote share than that with which Theresa May lost her majority in 2017.

Where Starmer has done well is the translation of votes to seats – thanks, in part, to Nigel Farage. His share of the seats, 63 per cent of the Commons, is joint with Tony Blair in being the highest of any post-war prime minister. Seldom has the first-past-the-post system been kinder – and never has a modern governing party won so many seats with so few votes. Starmer occupies both extremes, as the below graph shows.

Let’s look only at Labour vote shares in recent elections: Starmer’s result is middle of the road. He has cleaned up Labour, to be sure, but he has emphatically not widened its vote in the way that Tony Blair did in 1997. The change in England only is even smaller (0.6 points) because the bulk of the increase in Labour votes was due to the SNP collapse in Scotland.

So yes, Starmer has won, but there has been no sea change. No meteor. There’s just Farage – who enters parliament with just four other MPs. Reform UK’s main effect in this election has been to split the conservative vote and, in so doing, open up more constituencies to the Labour and the Lib Dems. Jacob Rees-Mogg was the highest profile of at least 145 Tories who would have won had Reform voters gone to the Conservatives.

Andrea Jenkyns, a hardline Brexiteer and a model of the politician Reform UK claims it wants to see in the parliament, lost her seat to Labour after Reform put a candidate up against her. The net result of Reform UK’s campaign is fewer voices in parliament advocating its kind of politics. But to many Reform voters, this is a price worth paying to give the Tories a kicking – and that mission has most certainly been accomplished. ‘Andrea Jenkyns and all the others’, Nigel Farage said when he greeted fellow Reform seat-winner Lee Anderson,‘"they’d all have won! They'd all have bloody won!’

Anyway, none of that matters now. Vote share will not be part of the conversation. But it is relevant in understanding how illusory Starmer's majority is: a Potemkin landslide which looks impressive but, upon inspection, does not have very much behind it. And this has implications. It is often said that Britain is an anomaly, parliament swinging to the left when Europe moves to the right. But have the British voters, really, moved left? The Lib Dems have more seats (71) than Reform (5) but Ed Davey’s men won fewer votes (3.5 million) that those of Nigel Farage (4.1 million). So it would be deeply misleading to take this parliament as a proxy for UK public opinion.

I expected Starmer to win a big majority, but neither I nor anyone else expected how low the Labour support would be. This time yesterday, I thought that Labour would be in for ten years. Today, seeing the shallowness of Starmer’s support, I think there is all to play for next time around. The voters have turned away from the Tories but did emphatically not turn towards Labour. Never in a century of elections have the two main parties had a lower combined vote share. All told, the next five years in British politics will be thrillingly unpredictable.