It was like New Year’s Eve in the Westminster Arms. As the clock ticked down to 10pm and the exit poll results neared, a shush spread across the late evening clientele, most of them in their 20s and 30s for whom the weekend started early.
When the Channel 4 coverage flashed “Labour landslide” across the screen, there was a raucous cheer that extended out into the street.
It could be heard around the corner where the Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) is located on Matthew Parker Street, an inconspicuous period building behind security gates.
There is no name plate to state that this is the nerve centre of the party that ruled the UK for most of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Tory supporters and their think tanks are renowned for their election night parties in better times. During the pandemic the CCHQ was the place where staff were fined following a “jingle and mingle” event during Christmas 2020, one of the many nails that would be driven into the coffin of the Tory party’s reputation and its trust with the British electorate.
They party together, but grieve alone. Most of those who emerged didn’t want to talk and those who did were reluctant to give their names except the sitting Tory MP Ben Spencer who had called into headquarters for a debrief.
He was defending a 18,270 majority in the constituency of Runnymede and Weybridge, a seat once held by the former chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond who resigned during the Brexit wars that preceded the election of Boris Johnson as Tory leader in 2019.
“It’s a very disappointing result, but we will see at the end of the evening. What I saw on the doorstep was a great deal of disillusionment with politicians in general,” he said.
One party worker who came out for a smoke said he was “upset for my party and for my country”. Given that the exit polls reflected the opinion polls, he could hardly be surprised. “Well, I was an optimist,” he countered.
Another party worker said the mood in HQ was “ okay, could be worse” given that some polls had them in third place behind the Liberal Democrats, a potential extinction-level event for the party.
He blamed the Reform Party for the demise rather than Labour’s success. “The Conservative Party only lost this election because the far right peeled off to Reform.”
What Labour does with its large majority is “none of my business really,” he continued. “The disappointment will come in about two years when the next lot crash everything because you have got a lot of people with no experience of running things.
“A political party is all about being a broad church. Keir [Starmer] has pieced together the far-left and the centrist part of the Labour Party to get elected.”
The man was quite dismissive of the Labour Party’s large majority given it was achieved on an expected vote share of just 36 per cent. “It’s not much of a majority when you think about it.”
Over in the cavernous Olympia Exhibition centre, where two London counts were going on side-by-side, defeated Tory candidate Andrew Dinsmore, who is originally from Belfast, predicted that the British people would come to regret their choice.
On a scale of one to 10, one being the worst and 10 being the best possible outcome for the Tories, he rated the final result as an eight out of 10.
“People said we were no longer going to be the opposition, but now we have a good base to build on. People wanted change. I don’t think they know the change that they voted for. I suspect this majority that Keir Starmer has built will quite quickly collapse.”
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