Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt were just some of the Conservative grandees who were ousted in the Labour landslide at the General Election
Election 2024: Liz Truss loses her seat in Norfolk South West
To those of you who couldn’t take your eyes off the annihilation, what was your Michael Portillo moment?
As you stayed up to greet the new dawn, what snapshot most dragged you back to that other glorious massacre in May 1997 when big Tory beasts like Portillo, David Mellor and Malcolm Rifkind stared blankly at the oncoming red tide that was drowning them? Jacob Rees-Mogg quoting Caractacus Potts in his double-breasted burial suit, little Grant Shapps almost blubbering or Penny Mordaunt falling, with Shakesepearian bluster, on to her coronation sword?
For me it came at 6.48am in South West Norfolk as Liz Truss saw her 26,195 Tory majority turned to dust and the semi-smiling, dead-eyed, thin-lipped Chucky doll acted as though nothing special had happened. Just as this cold sociopath, who should have been allowed nowhere near Downing Street, did when she resigned her premiership in disgrace.
More than any other image, Truss’s unexpected wipeout symbolised this seismic election result because it laid bare the nation’s visceral disgust at the way ordinary lives have been destroyed by a self-serving clique whose only interest was coveting more wealth and power. As witnessed in this election campaign by Sunak legging it home from Normandy to do an interview, and the shameless betting scandal.
In the early hours we heard a scream of rage at the Tory party from all parts of Britain which translated as “get thee behind me, Satan”. Watching the pain and humiliation writ large on their faces felt like scores being settled and justice being done. This generation of Tories defied the line “politicians are all as bad as each other” because these were mostly worse than the worst we had seen before. Venal con artists, many of them. I have written tens of thousands of words over the past 14 years expressing my horror at these amoral shysters. I have spilt gallons of ink trying to describe how they are enemies of all that is decent.
Yet it only took two words yesterday morning to encapsulate the nation’s verdict on them: Labour landslide. We have never witnessed a party getting what they deserved as much as this generation of Tories did, losing more deposits than at any time in their history. People can smell desperation. And the Tory campaign reeked of it.
Their warnings of Starmergeddon were ignored with contempt. Their line that “this election is not a referendum on the past” was an admission of their economic incompetence, their sleaziness and their knowing deceit. How could Sunak urge people to forget the past then ennoble the disgraced David Cameron and make him Foreign Secretary. Then bring in the even more disgraced Boris Johnson with 48 hours to go, hoping to breathe life into his twitching corpse of a campaign.
Labour’s 34% vote share, only 2% better than their last crushing defeat, shows that the country is not crying out to see Keir Starmer in No10 the way it was with Tony Blair in 1997. When the going gets tough, winning two-thirds of Westminster seats with only a third of the votes may throw up challenges for Labour, especially with so little financial muscle to repair the country. But that is for another day. Today let us do as Margaret Thatcher once urged us: just rejoice.
