I wonder if this sounds familiar. It’s almost two years since a general election, and the governing party is tearing itself apart. The PM, frequently criticised for being an awkward and unnatural communicator, is being pushed to announce a departure date – while trying to focus on the cost of living for ordinary Brits. Donald Trump is in the Oval Office and turning normal diplomacy on its head. Nigel Farage has launched a new party that is predicted to gouge votes from the government’s right flank. Outspoken MPs to the left are also causing major headaches.
The year I’m talking about is 2019, the evening of the final European Parliament elections held in the UK before it left the EU. The prime minister, of course, is Theresa May – and I was there. I was a junior adviser in the PM’s political office at the time. This meant handling MPs, party members and staff – essentially her role as leader of the Conservatives. It was not an easy time. Losing councillors means you are gutting your electoral machine. They are vital for canvassing and leafleting in general elections, and now a load of them have lost their jobs – and a nice bit of income – on your watch.
As is often the way, it was the perfect protest vote in what can feel like a US midterm. The Tories suffered devastating losses. Labour also had a rough night. Nigel Farage’s Brexit party – which boasted Ann Widdecombe and Annunziata Rees-Mogg as candidates – came from nowhere and took over 30 per cent of the vote share. The Greens, Lib Dems and nationalist parties also did well.
It mirrors so much of what we’re expecting on Thursday. If what we’re being told is right, Labour might lose up to 2,000 of its 2,500 seats. The Conservatives are again in for a rough night. Reform and the Greens are expecting to do incredibly well.
I have seen the devastating impact the perfect protest can have on a PM although in my case – another parallel? – the writing was already on the wall. May’s MPs were unhappy, as were vast swathes of the Conservative machinery. When she announced her departure it was still shocking though. After a busy week of campaigning and a sleepless night of putting results together, special advisers were summoned to the State Rooms to hear that she planned to step down. Halfway through, she complimented me on my shoes … and I was so confused and sleep deprived that I offered to lend them to her sometime. It was that surreal. And then we all tearfully wandered tearfully into the sunshine – the PM included – like we’d just finished exams and were wondering what to do with all this freedom. After months of struggle and uncertainty it felt like missing a step on a staircase.
May herself didn’t seem shocked. Numb perhaps. After all, only six weeks beforehand she had said to the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs that she was prepared to step aside once her Brexit deal finally got the numbers from them it needed. It didn’t even do that. That was some pretty clear writing on the wall.
Starmer, who was whipping his MPs last week to dodge the privileges committee, is not in that place yet. But it is perhaps fair to say he’s taken the first step onto the plank.
I’ve said the stakes are higher now compared to 2019. As is the nastiness. This cycle of local elections has seen some of the most grim political party broadcasts and adverts I have ever seen. Reform’s “Vote Green, get illegals” sloganeering sticks out. As does the Labour party’s clip of a woman reading out alleged tweets by Reform activists – such as comments by Peter York, the former vice-chairman of West Northamptonshire council, who said at an International Women’s Day event: “Some women should have never left the kitchen.” He later apologised. The tactic is the sort of thing I remember in America when I worked on Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. Sadly we seem to have exported it here.
In a few days we’ll know if they work. To my mind, perhaps the most devastating bit of chicanery was actually snuck into an ad Angela Rayner put out. In it she attacks Reform, saying Nigel Farage will destroy the NHS and no longer make it free at the point of use. But this is in response to a teenage boy saying he thinks Nigel Farage would be “better than Keir Starmer”. As attack ads go, you have to presume that blow to the PM is friendly fire.
The end in politics happens gradually, then suddenly. Back in 2019, Theresa May – who had won 317 seats but 42.4 per cent of the popular vote two years before – announced her departure within a fortnight of a damning set of elections. It remains to be seen what Keir Starmer – who won 411 seats but only 33.7 per cent of the popular vote just two years ago – will do. Or be forced to do.
Cleo Watson is a former deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson, and co-host of The Independent’s politics podcast, ‘In The Room’, with ex-deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. New episodes come out every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube
