The Labour Party crowd began arriving at 9pm on Thursday, election night, at the venue beneath the railway arches near Southwark station in south London. It was a Turkish restaurant, but would delight be on the menu for the nervous party faithful? They would find out within the hour.
The event, hosted by the Labour-linked lobbying firm Lodestone Communications, was billed as Labour’s “official unofficial” watch party for election results night. Food and drink were laid on with a DJ and big screens showing BBC News political coverage like a wedding crossed with a World Cup match viewing, but with Westminster as the pitch and the reds of Labour tackling the Tory blues.
The three linked rooms beneath the arches were filled with Labour staffers, advisers and supporters. Senior party figures were also there such as Tom Watson, its former deputy leader who now sits in the House of Lords, and fellow peer Roy Kennedy, who is Labour’s chief whip in the Lords. Another peer, Jack McConnell, the former Labour first minister of Scotland, was also there as a harbinger of the party’s dream to end the Westminster tartan hegemony of the Scottish National Party.
Every good wedding, if not every good World Cup match, always has an Irish contingent. The Irish Embassy in London’s intrepid political team, whose captain had pounded the byways of Britain throughout this gruelling six-week election campaign, appeared to be the only diplomats present. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has made a conspicuous virtue of its extensive links to Ireland.
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The DJ turned down the music at 9.55pm, five minutes before the close of voting booths and the release of the official exit poll that, barring statistical disaster, would give an instant result. A hush descended on the Labour people. Curiously, many of them moved to stand alone on the restaurant floor to watch the exit poll drop.
Those of us who merely observe politics instead of participating in it sometimes forget that for the party faithful of any hue, their commitment is a very personal thing. It is a part of their identity, borne of years attending branch meetings, handing out leaflets and canvassing in the rain for their tribe. A general election result is a big event in their lives. Such moments of gravity are sometimes best welcomed alone in your own thoughts. Anxiety was written across many faces.
The clock struck 10pm. The poll dropped. Labour was on course for a landslide victory and the Tories, it was now confirmed, consigned to a crushing defeat.
There was a smattering of cheering for the poll, especially in the room with the DJ and dance floor where the youngest of the party activists had gathered. But in the other rooms, there was more of a stunned silence, hands covering mouths, the poll-watching loners now drifting back into small groups to check with each other if the result was real.
It did not seem an air of triumphalism but rather, in those first few minutes afterwards, one of relief for many of the Labour supporters present. It was all over and yet it was all about to begin.
The scale of Labour’s triumph began to sink in. Watson looked momentarily pale, his emotions clearly at the gates. Five years before he had stood down as an MP after an exhausting few years in Labour under the Corbynistas, who subsequently led the party to electoral near-annihilation. Now the Labour that he recognised had been returned to the on-ramp of power. Senior figures such as Watson, Kennedy and McConnell will now get to influence government policy and effect real change. Again, these things matter to political people in deeply personal ways.
Not only had Labour vanquished the Tories, but also the SNP, which was set to lose close to 80 per cent of the seats it had won in 2019. McConnell, who served as Scotland’s first minister between 2001 and 2007, said that despite the scale of Labour’s victory in seats, the fact that its share of the vote had not grown much showed that the party still had to “persuade as well as govern”. Labour was now in a “completely new place in Scottish politics”, he said.
Mike Katz, chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, was smiling like he’d won at the bookies. He said he remembered the empty feeling following Labour’s defeat in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn. He also recalled how different the atmosphere was for Jewish people in Labour under that regime; Starmer has won back the trust of Jewish members who felt alienated in Labour before. “To go from that absolute nadir [2019] to this? Look how far we have come,” Katz said, still smiling.
The party went on into the small hours punctuated by cheers and claps each time constituency results rolled in and more Labour MPs were returned. The music cranked back up and the BBC screens went to subtitles. The DJ played D: Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, the anthem of Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, at least four times. The crowd got into the spirit of it. Tomorrow was another day.
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