Phil A

Dearie, dearie me. Almost nothing he says here is true. But even more worrying is the unthinking zeal with which he says it. You start to fear for the country. But no doubt poor pensioners facing a massive rise in fuel bills this autumn will be relieved by his enthusiasm. And perhaps he’d like to pay a visit to Denmark, which generates most of its electricity from renewables — and has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.

My last @TimesRadio Monologue of the election of 2024 The result was always a foregone conclusion but it was a night of significant and dramatic developments nonetheless. Three in particular — and Nigel Farage’s Reform party played a role in two of them.  Let’s start with the one that’s had least coverage: the demise of the SNP. The Nationalists have gone from 48 seats in 2019 to 9 or 10 (one Highland seat has still to report) now.  It’s a massive meltdown which heralds the end of Scottish separation for the foreseeable future, perhaps for a generation, perhaps forever. The United Kingdom survives intact and looks like remaining so.  That alone makes the election of 2024 hugely significant.  Labour has returned to dominate Scotland with almost twice as many Scottish seats than all the other parties put together. That’s a problem for any SNP comeback because the Nationalists always do best when there’s a Tory government in Westminster that Scotland did not vote for.  Now it faces a Labour government which Scotland has voted for. The SNP will struggle to hold on to power at Holyrood in two years time.  Scotland also played its part in Labour’s landslide, the biggest story of the night. Indeed, with Labour’s share of the vote stagnant in England, it was only because of Scotland that its vote share increased at all.  Labour has won a massive majority. It will be master of all it surveys. But it comes to unassailable power on only about 34% of the vote, which gave it 64% of the seats.  It’s only a percentage point or two more than Jeremy Corbyn won when he was on the wrong end of the Boris Johnson victory five years ago. A much smaller share than when Theresa May lost her overall majority in 2017. No government has come to power in modern times with such a small share of the vote.  Nor are Keir Starmer’s personal ratings especially stellar. Indeed they’re only a little better than Corbyn’s when he was Labour leader.  It was said that Starmer ran such a cautious and careful campaign that it was as if he was carrying around a Ming vase. His strategy has been vindicated. But it might make sense to carry that Ming vase into government.  No red dawn has risen this morning. No surge for socialism. As I’ve said before, Labour’s support is as wide as the ocean but as shallow as the village pond. It could dissipate quickly with only a couple of wrong or reckless moves. I suspect he realises that.  So why did Labour win so many seats on such a small vote share? Simple: Farage’s Reform party. In 140 seats the Tories failed to hold, Reform had a larger share of the vote than the Tory losing margin.  Labour owes its massive majority at least in part to a politician it despises. Reform is also the reason for the Tories’ catastrophic defeat. Starmer’s majority is just a little shy of Tony Blair’s historic landslide in 1997, which shredded the Tory party.  They’ve done even worse in 2024. In 1997 they were reduced to 165 seats, which was bad enough. This time they’re down to 122, their worst performance in almost 200 years.  For those of you looking for the night’s Portillo moment it came when Liz Truss had her very own ClusterTruss, managing to lose one of the safest Tory seats in the land.  It was emblematic of the Tory collapse. Perhaps not quite to a rump. But pretty close. Not just a very small base from which to recover. But small enough to be vulnerable to influence or infiltration from the forces of Farage.  This is good news for Starmer. He can set about running the country unimpeded while what’s left of the main opposition party is knocking lumps out of itself.  These sounds you can hear in the distance are the first shots in the upcoming Tory civil war.