Election 2024: A new day has broken in the most beautiful of all possible worlds

Bask in it. Savour it. We'll not see its like again.

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Drenched in joy. Just absolutely basking in it. One by one, watching these dreadful nightmarish ghouls face the music. What an unmitigated pleasure. The type of pleasure you only ghet to experience once or twice in your life.

Good morning. The dawn has broken. It's grey. It's raining. And it's a beautiful day. 

Turn on the TV and they'll likely try to talk you down. That's been the tone all night. They're doing it as I write this: a manifesto of sullen despair. They say Keir Starmer won't get a honeymoon. The electorate didn't vote for Labour, they just voted against the Tories. The vote share is poor. Small parties and independents tore chunks out of the party over Gaza. Farage and his team of populists are now established in the Commons. And even where they're not, they're the main challenger against Labour in many seats.

All of this is true. But here's the thing: Labour is in power. Keir Starmer is prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And that creates its own dynamics, which will make all the worrisome talk this morning fade into nothing.

First of all, let's just get one thing straight. What Starmer and his campaign chief Morgan McSweeney have accomplished here is historic. Remember where we were five years ago: Labour shattered. All of us saying that they'd take a decade to get back into power. And what did they do? They constructed a strategy to repair the damage. 

They understood the central truth of the British electoral system: we don't give a damn about the popular vote. What we care about is the efficiency of the geographic distribution of the vote. It should not be this way. We should have proportional representation. But as it happens, it is this way. So that is the way Starmer and McSweeney structured their plan.

Here's the thing about Starmer. Whatever the job he's given, he calculates how to accomplish it. It doesn't matter if he's a human rights barrister or the director of public prosecutions or running to be leader of the Labour party. He assesses what's required and then he executes it.

That's what he and McSweeney have done. They've secured the most efficient possible distribution of their vote. Unlike Corbyn's team, they didn't pile up votes pointlessly in seats they had already won. In fact they mostly got hammered over Gaza in their traditional urban seats. Instead, they totted up a bit of vote - not that much, but enough to win - precisely where they needed to win. They did the job.

Now they're going to have power. And power changes everything.

Just imagine what the chat on the TV news was like after the 2010 election. What would the pundits have been saying? After over a decade of Labour rule David Cameron had failed to secure any majority at all. He'd been forced to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. What a disappointment. He wouldn't get a honeymoon. No-one voted for him, they just voted against Labour. It was all so shallow.

Well, the thing is: none of that mattered, because power changes everything. The party stayed in government for 14 years. They have redrawn Britain - terribly, as it happens, but redrawn nonetheless. 

The same thing will happen now. Labour will redrawn Britain. And after five years of doing so the political debate will be completely different to what it is now. They will define the narrative of national life. They will set the terms.

What a profound joy it was to watch them execute the plan. What a profound delight it has been to see them claim their scalps. Jacob Rees-Mogg, this festering spider-web of a man, oozing entitlement, nativism and cynicism. Now he's gone. Penny Mordaunt, a vacuum in human form. Gone. Grant Shapps, a man with such little personality he doesn't even have a set identity. Gone. Gillian Keegan, Lucy Frazer, Simon Hart. All gone.

Each and every one of them felt like a Portillo moment. Mogg especially. I let out an involuntary roar when he was defeated that actually took me by surprise. It was a cry of relief and triumph after years of having to watch this dreadful little man, and those like him, continue to poison our political life.

But the real Portillo moment came later. It was Liz Truss. The instigator of Tory misfortune closed the curtain on their time in power. It was utterly fitting. 

She emerged blinking onto the stage at her count, after her opponents stood on stage awkwardly, wondering if she would ever come. Almost certainly she was hiding backstage, afraid to face the music. And then the result came in. It was historic. The biggest ever Tory to Labour swing in a constituency. The former prime minister had lost her seat. This paragon of uselessness and ideological mania finally met her electoral punishment. And afterwards, if you looked closely, you could see the anger in her robotic eyes. It was a beautiful sight, the likes of which we'll never forget.

That did not happen because of idealism or popularity. It happened because Starmer and McSweeney followed a plan and they executed it, to the letter. What absolute heroes.

Right. Now to bed, where we'll sleep the deep, deep sleep of the just. But later on we'll wake, and it'll be in a different country.