Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 280. Starmer’s Labour Landslide - 3:30am update About this episode What should we make of Labour’s landslide election win? How big a force can Reform UK become in UK politics? Where next for the Tory Party?
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Transcript 4,562 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
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2:29 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Rest is Politics election night special with me Rory Stewart.
2:33 Alastair Campbell? And me Alastair Campbell.
2:34 Rory Stewart? And here we are, three in the morning, so a couple of things just happened. One of them is Keir Starmer has just taken his seat, which is important because you can really, basically in the modern world, only be Prime Minister and MP.
2:43 Alastair Campbell? Mm-hmm.
2:44 Rory Stewart? Other great news tonight so far, your nephew has managed to take the seat of Rushcliffe. And apart from the fact that he's your nephew, it's actually important news. That was a seat that was controlled by the Conservatives under Ken Clark.
2:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
2:56 Rory Stewart? From the early 1970s.
2:57 Alastair Campbell? And he got a decent majority.
2:58 Rory Stewart? Safe Conservative seat from 1950s. So actually, people haven't been talking much about Rushcliffe, but it's a good route in to the story of the night, which is essentially a story of Labour taking an astonishing majority. It's not the end of the night, you don't know exactly how big that majority is going to be, but there's no doubt it's going to be one of the largest swings on record.
3:19 Alastair Campbell? Mm-hmm.
3:19 Rory Stewart? And Labour is going to come out with a very, very comfortable majority. Tell us a little better how you're feeling.
3:24 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think it's, I think it's going to be the fourth biggest majority ever.
3:28 Rory Stewart? If the exit polls are right.
3:30 Alastair Campbell? If the exit polls are right. Are we both thinking the exit polls are wrong?
3:32 Rory Stewart? Yeah, here's my prediction. I think actually it may be bigger than your 97 majority. I think the Tories will do worse than in the exit polls. And I think Reform will do worse than in the exit polls.
3:41 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's gone up, when the exit poll came out, it said majority 170. I think it's already looking like 179. Just as we're, as we're talking, so now just after three o'clock.
3:52 Rory Stewart? And 179 is, 179 is what you had in 97.
3:56 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
3:56 Rory Stewart? So this is, and that win in 97 was kind of record-breaking in every dimension, wasn't it?
4:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
4:02 Rory Stewart? So this is extraordinary, but the big difference, one of the big differences is that when you did it in 1997, you did it with a big share of the popular vote. So 97, you, you came in with 43.2% of the popular vote. Labour could do it this time on maybe 35, 36% of the popular vote.
4:21 Alastair Campbell? I think it's definitely going to be under 40. The thing, people haven't, you know, we, we both said earlier today that we're fed up talking about opinion polls, but the thing about the polls that's not been getting much attention is actually the fact that Labour's support has been. Not diving, but steadily falling a little bit over the last few weeks. And interestingly, I think that is to do with, although we both agree the Tory campaign's been terrible, they did land their messages on tax and this supermajority thing. Now, as it happens, the supermajority, which is a load of nonsense, and I think was about suppressing the vote, it seems to have shifted as many people towards Reform as a way of stopping Labour as it has the Tories. And I think one of the stories that's developing tonight, in just how many seats that Labour are winning,
5:06 Alastair Campbell? it is Reform who are going to come second.
5:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and so let's step back and look at the Reform story. So when the results come tomorrow morning, we'll know for sure that Reform has got remarkably few seats. We don't know how few.
5:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, they've got one so far.
5:21 Rory Stewart? They've got one so far.
5:22 Alastair Campbell? I think Nigel Farage is pretty nailed on.
5:24 Rory Stewart? But it doesn't really matter, even if it's two or whether it's 12.
5:27 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think it matters if Farage gets in.
5:29 Rory Stewart? Yep, but in the big picture is they could well end up with getting, you know, a lot of votes, millions of votes across the country, and they'll get very few seats. They'll almost certainly get almost twice as many votes as the Lib Dems, for example, or maybe third more than the Lib Dems, but they will get far fewer seats than the Lib Dems. But what we're seeing in a lot of these results so far is Labour coming in, Labour taking the seat, but Labour taking the seat often on not a very high percentage of the vote. They're not getting 60% of the vote, they're getting high 30s, low 40s, and being pushed by Reform.
6:09 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
6:09 Rory Stewart? And when the Conservatives are holding seats, so we just saw North East Cambridgeshire, Steve Barclay's seat, 35% swing against the Conservatives, 27% swing in favour of Reform.
6:21 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
6:22 Rory Stewart? He's just holding on, but they're losing these enormous majorities and holding on by a few thousand. Again, that's Reform kicking in. So Reform is a big part of this whole story in explaining sometimes why the Lib Dems are taking seats, why Labour's taking seats, why the Tories are losing majorities, but it's not necessarily translating into them having seats in Parliament.
6:42 Alastair Campbell? What did you think when we were talking to Rachel Reeves earlier in the evening? What did you think of what she said in response to my question about how would a Labour? Government tackle the rise of the far right under Farage.
6:55 Rory Stewart? Well, it's such a good question, and you asked it twice. To be honest, she pivoted away from that question pretty quickly. I guess you were hoping that she was going to say what you feel strongly, right, which is the big strategic choice, which is you can't out Farage Farage by Jeremy Corbyn.
7:11 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
7:12 Rory Stewart? But what she actually talked about is closing borders and showing that we can control borders, which slightly sounded as though she thought.
7:18 Alastair Campbell? I think that's fine. No, I think that's okay. But I think this is going to be, look, we shouldn't get away from the fact, the big story tonight is a landslide, Keir Starmer becoming the fourth leader of the Labour Party to lead the party from opposition to government. I mean, when you think how many Tory prime ministers we've had in the last few years, there have been more Tory prime ministers than there have been Labour prime ministers who've gone from opposition to government. So it's an amazing achievement. But I do think two of the issues that are going to come up on the rails pretty quickly. One is, how do you deal with this rise of the right, the radical right? Do you learn from France and Germany and some of the other European countries who've handled it pretty badly? Do you try and go a different way? And then the second issue that I think is
8:03 Alastair Campbell? going to come up on the rails is electoral reform. Because you're looking at a situation where Labour has this massive majority on probably, possibly less of a share of the vote than Jeremy Corbyn got.
8:17 Rory Stewart? Yes, almost certainly.
8:18 Alastair Campbell? Against Theresa May.
8:19 Rory Stewart? Almost certainly.
8:19 Alastair Campbell? Because the smaller parties weren't doing so well.
8:21 Rory Stewart? Almost certainly. Corbyn probably, you know, Corbyn got into the 40s, and this will probably be in the mid 30s.
8:26 Alastair Campbell? The Lib Dems having a share of the vote that is actually roughly on a par with when they were getting absolutely smashed, second time around with Nick Legg, and Reform having millions of votes, as you say, in one, two, three, four seats.
8:39 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
8:40 Alastair Campbell? So I think that is a debate that's coming. And it'll be really interesting to see whether your friend Ed Davey, who I thought had made a very nice acceptance speech today, totally in keeping with the positive, lively nature of his campaign, which you so despise. And I love the way he called out his wife, but he did it in such a genuine way. So did Keir, to be fair. I think you can always tell when a couple really do love each other when they don't.
9:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
9:02 Alastair Campbell? You can see quite a few in politics who don't. But I, I, I think that PR issue is going to come down the track pretty quickly.
9:08 Rory Stewart? This extraordinary imagery that we saw of everybody walking to vote. And when, when they walked to vote, you, you saw Keir Starmer walking with his wife. You saw Rishi Sunak walking with his wife. And then you saw very oddly Nigel Farage sort of marching in a very sort of awkward way.
9:24 Alastair Campbell? Looking like he's walking to the golf club.
9:26 Rory Stewart? It was very, very peculiar.
9:27 Alastair Campbell? For dinner.
9:27 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
9:28 Alastair Campbell? Why is he starting to wear those jackets sort of that just come down to his belt?
9:31 Rory Stewart? It's, it's very peculiar.
9:32 Alastair Campbell? Very, very odd.
9:33 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah. I'm glad to see George Galloway has been knocked out.
9:36 Alastair Campbell? Oh, and Paul Waugh.
9:37 Rory Stewart? Paul Waugh came in.
9:38 Alastair Campbell? Paul Waugh is a very good guy.
9:40 Rory Stewart? George Galloway knocked out having taken £10,000 donation from Andrew Tate's brother.
9:45 Alastair Campbell? Brother, yeah, yeah.
9:47 Rory Stewart? Uh, so a, a guy who is currently under investigation, unless I'm getting strong, I'm probably going to get the podcast in trouble.
9:53 Alastair Campbell? No, I think he is part of the investigation, yeah.
9:55 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
9:56 Alastair Campbell? And also, by the way, talking of Andrew Tate, I hate talking about Andrew Tate. But as you know, I go into lots of schools, particularly at the moment where we haven't, we haven't decided yet, by the way, how we're going to get our books onto the set.
10:05 Rory Stewart? How we promote it.
10:06 Alastair Campbell? It's going to be quite difficult, so.
10:07 Rory Stewart? I don't think it's that difficult. I think they're not concentrated. As it gets later in the night, they're going to take their focus off and you just bring them on.
10:13 Alastair Campbell? I saw what I might do is just read the primary school book to Nadine Dorries for a bit.
10:17 Rory Stewart? That'd be good.
10:18 Alastair Campbell? I think that would go a lot more.
10:19 Rory Stewart? So for people who weren't watching the Channel 4 thing, the backstory here is that Alice had gotten a slightly scratchy standoff with Nadine Dorries close to the beginning.
10:27 Alastair Campbell? I think your, I think your presence calmed me quite a lot.
10:30 Rory Stewart? Good.
10:30 Alastair Campbell? Because I think a few years ago, that would have been the over the top, don't you dare call me sexist, right? Don't you dare start. But anyway, forget her. I think that, that one of the other questions we've got to talk about is kind of where you genuinely where you think the Tory party goes. Because some of your friends and some like, and also some people in the same wing of the Tory party as you have lost.
10:55 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
10:55 Alastair Campbell? Alex Chalk's gone recently.
10:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
10:57 Alastair Campbell? Uh, George Osborne's right hand man, Rupert Harrison, has lost.
11:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah, Gillian Keegan looks like she's lost.
11:02 Alastair Campbell? Gillian Keegan looks like she's in trouble.
11:03 Rory Stewart? So, so if I, if I go back to the people who, uh, worked with me on trying to get the customs union through. So a much closer relationship with the EU, so voted for Brexit, but we want a soft Brexit. It was people like Alex Chalk who organised that whole thing.
11:21 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
11:22 Rory Stewart? Gillian Keegan and Alex Chalk were cornerstones to my leadership campaign. They've gone on to be cabinet ministers. They represented the centre left and the Conservative Party. They've lost their seats.
11:32 Alastair Campbell? We don't know Gillian Keegan's lost her seat yet, do we? We just know that the Liberal Democrats are saying they've definitely won.
11:38 Rory Stewart? Yeah, exactly. And it will be an amazing victory for them, she has, because she had a very, very big majority there.
11:44 Alastair Campbell? Twenty thousand plus.
11:44 Rory Stewart? So I'm keeping my fingers crossed in that. But it looks like Simon Hart possibly the chief whip, who again is from my part of the party, is in trouble. So if you look at Rishi Sunak's cabinet, almost all the centre left of the cabinet looks like they might be about to lose their seat. And the right are pretty safe because a lot of them are holding, kind of, Priti Patel holds an Essex seat that's pretty safe. Marc Francois, who was the ERG guy, first to win.
12:07 Alastair Campbell? Badenoch, Raverman.
12:09 Rory Stewart? So I think, you know, we talk often about whether the Conservative Party will tilt to the right because of the success of Reform in percentage terms. But there's another thing, which is the members of parliament are very, very influential in choosing who the next leader is.
12:26 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
12:26 Rory Stewart? And if the members of parliament are increasingly Brexit-voting, right-wing people from that part of that. And we've lost, remember, we'd already lost 21 of the more lefty Conservatives because we went against Boris Johnson. We lost some more before that, had Heidi Allen and people on the show who left even before we did.
12:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
12:45 Rory Stewart? You're really looking at a party that's very different.
12:48 Alastair Campbell? Okay, all right, quick break, back in a minute.
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14:44 Alastair Campbell? There's going to be an awful lot of blame gaming going on within the Conservative Party. Of the three, of the last, now let's take them all. Of the five prime ministers of the last 14 years. Where do you think the bulk of the Conservative Party will order them in terms of blame for this defeat?
15:01 Rory Stewart? I think unfairly, many Conservative Party members will put it on Rishi Sunak.
15:09 Alastair Campbell? What do you think?
15:10 Rory Stewart? Oh, I think the problem lies with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And I think Alan Johnson made the point very, very fluently when we were talking to him just an hour ago. This great former Labour Cabinet Minister said, listen, if the problem had been austerity, they would have kicked the Tories out in 2015. If the problem had been, you know, Theresa May and stuff, they would have kicked them out in 2017. Or even 2019. You've got to look at the truth. Something's changed between 2019 and today. And it's not my part of the party, it's since it got taken over by the Boris-hard Brexit and then irresponsible Liz Truss wing.
15:48 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
15:49 Rory Stewart? That they've been really punished in the polls.
15:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. So Sunak presumably is going to resign pretty quickly.
15:57 Rory Stewart? And of course, people won't want that. They'll be desperate. He will, but they'll be desperate he stays as long as possible to try to stabilize the party, have an orderly leadership transition.
16:06 Alastair Campbell? I mean, he said, he said in interviews that he will stay as an MP. Regardless of whether he wins or loses, do you think he will?
16:16 Rory Stewart? Well, David Cameron, I was talking to Quasi Corset earlier this evening, said to both me and Quasi, he would always remain as the MP for Whitney, and it was the greatest honour of his life, and he was off in about three weeks.
16:24 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, Tony Blair always said he'd be off.
16:27 Rory Stewart? Right, he always said he'd be off, right. So. No, I think Rishi Sunak won't stay around, and why would he, to be honest? I mean, he doesn't look happy in the job. I still believe he triggered the election at the worst possible moment because he had some Freudian desire to get out of the job.
16:43 Alastair Campbell? What do you think of the turnout? The turnout's an issue, isn't it? I mean, do you think we'll ever get to a a place where we rebuild this sense of civic, the importance of civic engagement?
16:55 Rory Stewart? It's so weird because.
16:56 Alastair Campbell? Every single seat so far has had a lower turnout.
16:59 Rory Stewart? It's so sad, and I, because we, you know, we're recording this at three in the morning. And although we're doing, you know, I'd say to flatter ourselves maybe slightly better than Ann Whitaker is at this time in the morning. One of the things that, that's a bit unfair to Ann, but I'm increasingly, they keep putting makeup on me. I now look a little bit like Joe Biden going into the second hour of the debate. But one of the things I've been doing is endlessly doing historical research. So 1906, which was the last time there was a really dramatic swing against the Tories. The Tories have basically been in since the 1880s, looked like they'd never be shifted, and then shift to Liberals. Huge opportunity, something that should inspire Keir Starmer, because that was the moment where this amazing radical government came in,
17:43 Rory Stewart? brought in the old age pension, reformed the House of Lords, you know, changed all the stuff. But that was achieved on a turnout in those days, like 87, 88% of the vote. Even under Thatcher, you were, you know, at 80%, we're now dropping down sort of 60%.
18:01 Alastair Campbell? I think one of the reasons, I think one of the reasons that that's happening. Is because this this this debate in particular, this election in particular, the polls have been the centre of discussion and all the polls have been saying, I mean, pretty accurately, as it turns out, Labour are absolutely walking this election.
18:21 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
18:21 Alastair Campbell? But it means that there's been no sense of jeopardy, no sense of risk, no sense of this is exciting. And I think it's just turned people off. And then you have the super majority strategy and so forth. By the way, we've just heard that Jeremy Corbyn has won quite substantially. So he's back as an independent, one Galloway, Galloway out, Corbyn in.
18:40 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
18:41 Alastair Campbell? Um, so I I.
18:42 Rory Stewart? And and with with Corbyn, Corbyn and Lee Anderson does demonstrate that in some constituencies, it's still possible for the personal vote to flip against the party.
18:52 Alastair Campbell? Although I was really interested in that Lee Anderson vote, that you had a guy there who was a Liberal Democrat, standing now as an independent.
18:58 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
18:59 Alastair Campbell? Why was he not standing as a Liberal Democrat? He got nearly seven thousand votes.
19:02 Rory Stewart? Some extraordinary story going on there. Yeah.
19:04 Alastair Campbell? Weird.
19:05 Rory Stewart? Because the Liberal, so the Asheville constituency, just to sort of, for the explainer on that, this was a constituency which Gloria Del Piero, who was a Labour MP, took in a very narrow victory against the Lib Dems in 2010, built into a decent Labour majority. And the person who ran her office, her Labour office, was this man Lee Anderson, who was a kind of Labour activist.
19:27 Alastair Campbell? He's on a right journey, isn't he? Where's he going to end up?
19:29 Rory Stewart? Defected to Conservatives, took the seat for the Conservatives, now defected to Reform, has taken the seat now for Reform.
19:35 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
19:35 Rory Stewart? And the Lib Dem vote has vanished.
19:37 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
19:37 Rory Stewart? So that's another interesting thing, because normally the story would be that Reform nicks the votes from the Conservatives or Labour. And in this case, the party looks as though they're stoning the votes from the Lib Dems, which is the most confusing thing you've ever seen in your life.
19:48 Alastair Campbell? Listen, we said right at the start of the night, that even though the overall picture is pretty clear, Labour landslide, Tories in real trouble, Reform doing reasonably well, SNP in a bit of trouble. That there would be some unusual results. And so I don't think Gerry McCorvan was totally unexpected, but the majority may be seven thousand. Galloway gone, but another independent has beaten Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester. Jonathan Ashworth would have been a member, quite a senior member of the cabinet. I think the situation there is really, really complicated because you've got Israel Gaza, and a lot of people will be angry with Labour about that. You've also got kind of, I think you've got quite a lot of India Pakistan stuff going on there. I don't know whether that's playing out for him as well. So a complicated seat
20:33 Alastair Campbell? and clearly he's fallen foul of it all. I wonder as well whether it's one of those situations where the polls were showing he was pretty safe. So actually, because he was one of the key campaigners, maybe not there on the ground too much.
20:46 Rory Stewart? Well, famously, that's what went wrong for Chris Patton, wasn't it?
20:49 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely, he was Tory chairman in Bath, yeah. The other one who I think is absolutely certain to have gone is Thangam Debenhay.
20:54 Rory Stewart? Right.
20:54 Alastair Campbell? So actually, that means that Keir Starmer, if he was planning to put his shadow cabinet into the cabinet, as the cabinet, he's got two gaps to fill already.
21:02 Rory Stewart? He's now got to reorganise and rethink.
21:04 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
21:04 Rory Stewart? Okay, so let's, just as we finish, before we go back into the Maelstrom, you must be feeling incredibly happy. I mean, I know you're not expressing that necessarily at three thirty in the morning, but it is, if we stop getting into the micro details and see the wood from the trees, this is phenomenal, right?
21:20 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yeah. I mean, we said on the podcast a while back that it's just three years since after the Hartlepool by-election, Keir Starmer came around for a cup of tea at my house and was very, very low. And I wasn't helping very much.
21:37 Rory Stewart? Just remind people what happened in Hartlepool.
21:39 Alastair Campbell? So lost the by-election, lost the by-election.
21:42 Rory Stewart? A safe Labour seat.
21:43 Alastair Campbell? A Labour seat was lost to the Tories.
21:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
21:46 Alastair Campbell? Under Keir Starmer's leadership.
21:48 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
21:48 Alastair Campbell? With Boris Johnson in charge. And that was a moment where people thought, my God, if Labour can't win back Hartlepool.
21:53 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
21:53 Alastair Campbell? From this awful, wretched government. So I think, and I think I've said to you before that he made this pitch at the time, he said, I've got to do this in three stages. Decontaminate the Labour brand, then show the Tories are unfit to govern and then set out a positive alternative. Well, you've got to hand it to him. He's done it.
22:12 Rory Stewart? He's certainly one. I would say he did the first two better than the third one. I still don't fully see the positive alternative. I keep handing hospital passes to Labour Shadow Ministers, saying, "Excite us and give us a vision of the future."
22:26 Alastair Campbell? And I also thought they've got to get very quickly from campaign mode into government mode. We've interviewed quite a few. We've talked to quite a few of the chair cabinet tonight. And fair enough, it's still the election campaign in their heads, but they were still going straight back into turn the page, you know, end the chaos. It's now all about delivery. And the only way they're going to deal with Farage, who by the way, somebody just told me has won, 21,000 for him, 12,000 for the Tory. So that's a pretty big win. So Farage, an eighth time of trying, has got in perseverance. You've got to hand it to him. And he will be, whether we like it or not, Farage is a very, very, very effective communicator. I think he'll hate Parliament, though.
23:06 Rory Stewart? Well, let's take a break and we'll be back in six hours' time. Thank you very much.
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Previous 279. The Day Britain Decides Next 281. How one night transformed British politics Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
