Whole bookcases will no doubt be written about the 2024 election, which featured the biggest parliamentary swing in British history: one party was handed its largest-ever majority less than five years after a seismic defeat, and another reduced by two thirds to its smallest-ever number of MPs. What happened? How did it happen? And what does it all mean for what happens next?
Two assessments are available this autumn. Taken as Red, by the seasoned political journalist Anushka Asthana, is the swiftest “first draft of history” to land, a comprehensive exploration into everything that led to Keir Starmer marching into Downing Street on 5 July. Losing It by the Conservative pollster Michael Ashcroft offers a deeper dive into one specific part of the puzzle: the millions of people who voted Tory in 2019 but abandoned the party in 2024.
“The Tories didn’t so much play a difficult hand badly as drop all their cards on the floor,” is Ashcroft’s frank assessment of how the party managed to alienate supporters so badly that the party lost half its 2019 voters. Riffing off Ronald Reagan’s diktat that “you’ve got to dance with the one that brung ya”, he concludes: “It’s not as if the Conservatives took one group of voters to the party and then danced with another. It’s more that they went straight to the bar, got in a fight with their mates, tripped over their own feet and passed out in the car park. In the rain.”
Using two mega polls – one just after people had voted and one in August – and 24 focus groups over the summer, Ashcroft examines just how toxic the Conservatives had become to their own voters, to the point where “even those who voted Conservative in 2024 were evenly divided as to whether the Tories deserved to lose or not”. The conclusions gleaned from these brutal 96 pages should send a chill through the spines of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick as they battle to take on the mantle of this broken party.
Chief among them is that, as suspected, former Tories split in every direction, including towards the sofa: millions of people stayed at home. Ashcroft finds that, of those who did turn out, only half of 2019 Conservative voters returned to the party, while 23 per cent defected to Reform, 12 per cent backed Labour and 7 per cent switched to the Lib Dems. Unsurprisingly, these groups have radically different reasons for their choices, although the sense that the Tories had lost voters’ trust and were incompetent unites them.
Losing It is a piece of electoral analysis rather than a narrative, coolly taking the reader through the numbers with the help of liberally sprinkled charts and graphs, illustrated in primary-school colours that belie the severity of their message. Particularly jarring/amusing (delete according to your political priorities) is a table of responses to the question: “By 2024 the Conservative Party had become too…” Listed in alphabetical order and colour-coded by letter were: “clueless”, “corrupt” and “crooked” in sunny orange; “weak” and “woke”
in grass green. Did the participants answering the question with “up its own arse” expect their assessment to be duly recorded? There it is, in cheerful sky blue, right between “untrustworthy” and “useless”.
The quotes from the focus groups are as vicious as you might imagine. But parts of the book counter received wisdom, particularly when it comes to the impact of Reform.
For Conservatives telling themselves that things would have been radically different had Nigel Farage not presented such a strong last-minute challenge, there are some sobering statistics. Asked what they would have done had there not been a Reform candidate in their constituency, just 30 per cent of Reform backers say they would have voted Conservative, while 26 per cent said they would simply not have voted. As to whether redemption for the Tories lies in moving rightwards, there is an utter lack of consensus. Nearly half of Tory-Reform switchers would like to see the Conservatives become more like Farage’s party (in addition to the 29 per cent who support a merger between the two), yet around two thirds of those who abandoned them for Labour or the Liberal Democrats emphatically would not. For Tories trying to chart a route back to electoral success, it’s despair-inducing.
Reading Losing It, it is easy to conclude that all Labour had to do to win is sit still and let the Conservatives blow themselves up. But the disintegration of the Tories revealed by Ashcroft’s polling is just one element of Labour’s epic quest back into power presented in Taken as Red.
While the second half of Asthana’s book looks at the Conservative implosion, the first is an origin story of the Keir Starmer project. It’s a story that almost predates Starmer’s entry into parliament, back to the foundingcof the Labour Together think tank in June 2015. Set up after Ed Miliband’s defeat, it quickly became a vehicle for moving the party away from Corbynism, then for getting a revamped Labour into power. A movement in search of a champion, it was Labour Together that picked Starmer, not the other way around.
Packed with detail and meticulously sourced, Taken as Red offers two specific insights to readers who think they know what led to the 2024 election result. First is a who’s who of everyone integral to the Labour recovery. Some of the characters will be familiar – and not just the MPs now serving on the front bench. There’s a whole chapter on “the Morganiser” Morgan McSweeney, the campaign director considered to have masterminded Starmerism, and who recently became the Prime Minister’s chief of staff. Others have little name recognition beyond the Westminster bubble even as they have moved into Downing Street: Stuart Ingham, Starmer’s head of strategy in opposition and currently director of the No 10 policy unit; Hollie “Field Marshal” Ridley, who led the electoral field operation and was appointed Labour’s general secretary in September; Vidhya Alakeson, the woman in charge of the party’s reset with business, who has just become one of McSweeney’s deputies. For those scrambling to understand Starmer’s top team, this book will prove an invaluable resource.
The second insight is a behind-the-scenes account of what had to happen to bring Labour back to electoral viability. Part of this relates to efforts to “detoxify” the party on issues ranging from economic credibility to the national anthem. Asthana opens with Starmer’s high-stakes gamble to hold a minute’s silence in honour of the late Queen at Labour’s 2022 conference, signalling to the nation a new, patriotic post-Corbyn party. Part of it is an intense mindset shift; she cites a poll from 2016 which found that 40 per cent of Labour members agreed with the statement: “I would rather lose an election than compromise on my principles.” Five years later, having just forced through rule changes to the party that would make it virtually impossible for another Corbyn-like figure to emerge as leader, Starmer was asked what was more important to him: unity or winning. “I didn’t come into politics to vote over and over again in parliament and lose and then tweet about it,” came the reply.
From the anecdotes and interviews about Starmer emerges a steeliness, a determination to win that explains how someone could go from political outsider to entering No 10 in just nine years. Documented along the way are the traps he laid for various Conservative prime ministers as leader of the opposition (such as his de facto prosecution of the partygate scandal), the mistakes he made (most humiliatingly, Labour’s loss of the Hartlepool by-election in 2021), and what he learned from them, often involving radical shake-ups of his team (as with the sudden recent departure of Sue Gray). Starmer is often described as a lucky general and Taken as Red does not debunk this assessment, but it does describe the immense amount of work needed to take advantage of this luck when it came.
The book details, too, the impact of Labour’s relentlessly data-driven approach. This was led by McSweeney, who cut his teeth in the 2006 Lambeth Council elections in which he crunched the numbers and concluded he could win by persuading just 6 per cent of Lambeth’s total electorate to vote Labour. It worked. A variation of this ruthlessly targeted strategy played out on a larger scale in July. Those who think it was an odd quirk of the UK’s voting system that the party won two thirds of MPs with just 34 per cent of the vote should think again: this outcome was the entire point.
It is also, as the political scientist Rob Ford puts it, a “masterpiece of political jenga”. The coalition assembled by McSweeney and his foot soldiers is exceedingly fragile, raising the risk of Starmer’s majority collapsing just as dramatically as Boris Johnson’s did. One can already imagine how the parallel book to Losing It, following a defeat for Labour in 2029, might read. In both these books, there is a pervasive sense of voter volatility.
But the idea that a Labour victory was inevitable because the Tories were so broken that any opposition leader would have won disregards years of planning, effort and controversial decisions. While the temptation to put 2024 down in the history books as an election the Conservatives lost rather than Labour won – as the title of Losing It implies – is understandable, it isn’t the full picture. And with political strategists already thinking ahead to 2029, both Labour and the Conservatives would do well to keep that in mind.
Taken as Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party
Anushka Asthana
HarperNorth, 320pp, £22
Losing It
Michael Ashcroft
Biteback, 96pp, £10
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[See also: Myths of the great statesmen]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate