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Twenty years ago, the Labour Party under Tony Blair cruised to re-election. Labour lost just six seats in 2001, returning 412 MPs. The Conservatives, meanwhile, who lost more than half their seats overnight in 1997, added only one, leaving them on 166.
Throughout its existence, Labour had never been in power for more than six consecutive years. It was re-election, rather than the 1997 landslide, that marked the high point of New Labour. In the wake of its 2001 win, Labour was “broadly hegemonic”, says Douglas Alexander, who coordinated that election for the party. It had won in England, Wales and Scotland. The result appeared to confirm, as John Gray put it in 1997, that “Tory Britain is gone for good”.
Two decades on, it is Labour that has lost more than half its seats. The party’s razor-thin Batley and Spen by-election victory in July may have quietened critics, but it cannot mask the fact that Labour today has only 199 MPs, a loss of 213 over 20 years. The Conservatives, by contrast, have increased their vote share in every election since 1997. In 2019 Boris Johnson won a greater vote share (43.6 per cent) than Blair ever did.
