Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

The question for Labour was whether the fourth worst defeat in their modern history could be considered a victory. It certainly felt like one. Corbyn had added thirty seats and 9.6 per cent to Labour’s vote share. His 12.9m votes were the best performance since Tony Blair’s second landslide in 2001. However, a Labour official said, ‘Jeremy’s programme moved people and the Tory campaign was a disaster but the reason we were up 9 per cent was that the Liberal Democrats and Ukip have basically ceased to exist. Once you remove their decline, the swing to us was only 2 per cent. That is not a big swing. Our haul of seats is the fourth worst in our history since 1935. By those definitions it’s not a good result. But it’s a great result because we were so far behind.’ A source close to McDonnell said, ‘We’d gone through a year of people telling us we were going to take the Labour Party to the dogs and now we’ve given it the first injection of life it has had in ten years. We’ve energised politics on the left.’