Starmer in avalanche and Sunak’s farewell –

Pietro De Leo

July 05, 2024

It won’t be the cool Britannia of 1997, there won’t be Spice Girls and Oasis to cement the imagination across the Channel and the Ocean, and yet the Labour Party is back. As we go to press, the exit polls for the UK elections credit Labour with 410 seats (+209) with an overwhelming majority, while the Tories collapse to 131 seats (-241). The other big expectation of the event, Nigel Farage’s Refor UK, reaches fourth place with only 13 seats. The English system, in fact, assigns the 659 seats of the House of Commons based on the “first pass the post” mechanism, the one who gets the most votes wins in the constituency, without a run-off. A new page, a new story. After fourteen years of Conservative government. The party arrived at the appointment exhausted, with the leadership of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who carried on his shoulders the weight of almost three very complicated decades, the backlash of divisions and changes of skin. We start from the front with the story of David Cameron (outgoing Foreign Secretary), son of the elite education of Eton who destroyed his career first by calling the referendum on Brexit, and then losing it.

The Downing Street baton then passed to Theresa May, an “exiteer” without much impetus, dismantled piece by piece by a complex and exhausting negotiation for the detachment from Brussels. Then began the season of Boris Johnson, among the leaders of the “exit” who decided to go to the polls a few months following his entry into the most coveted residence by English politicians, Christmas 2019. He won, but a black wave stretched over the Kingdom, as over the rest of the world, Covid. Talented, brilliant, a man of immense culture and equally political unscrupulousness, the impact of Johnson’s figure hit a party with great tradition. The drama of the pandemic intertwined with the Prime Minister’s story, made of staff aperitifs in the Downing Street courtyard while the people were locked up at home, cheerful spending and slightly out of the ordinary advisors. The party split and began to lose consensus on the territory. Johnson drops out a few days before the death of Queen Elizabeth, to whom he was literally devoted in 2022. Enters his Foreign Minister, Liz Truss, who lasts less than two months. And so begins the Sunak era. The Spoon River of Conservative leaders on the last page, however, delivers a very different party, fallen into dirigiste slides on the environmental issue and restrictive on the fiscal one, with peaks of regulatory gigantism. Just think of the anti-smoking plan promoted by Sunak, stuff that would make Churchill turn in his grave. And in the meantime, here on earth, the voters have turned the other way.

And the Labour dilemma will arrive in Downing Street, fourteen years following the colourless Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, an honest lawyer from Surrey, son of a small entrepreneur and a nurse. An Arsenal fan, he has dealt with human rights in his work, and was also in Berlusconi’s legal team for the appeal to the ECHR that the founder of Forza Italia brought once morest the conviction he received in 2013. Starmer inherited a party engulfed in Jeremy Corbyn’s ideological entrenchment, leading it back into the reformist fold and making it grow. He has started talking regarding “securenomics” once more, reallocation of production to create jobs, he has taken a reassuring line capable of calming a middle class in the waves of difficult times but, in some respects, tired of conservative twists. It is certainly not the time for Blairism, the 90s are long gone and everyone is leading on their own, but the parallel is being made and will be made. And the dynamics have reversed. Now it is the Tories, who have burned leaders like incense sticks, who have to give themselves a future. On which Boris Johnson does not seem to disdain the re-emergence. After all, he is passionate regarding classical culture, where the figure of Cincinnatus always has full charm.