Election night 2019 was a leaden December evening marking the end of a frazzled political year. Walking through the deserted City of London to the Financial Times’s newsroom, my stomach and head were queasy. The fatigue from long months of political warfare was vying with anticipation for the long night ahead – and the possibility the UK may be on the cusp of finding closure.
That year began and ended with Brexit and the tortuous process of breaking ties with the European Union after a nationwide referendum. It began with Prime Minister Theresa May securing a withdrawal agreement to extract the UK from the bloc after four years of rancorous bickering. But in successive late-night votes, the deal failed to find a majority in the House of Commons. The governing Conservative Party was tearing itself apart and the Labour opposition was adrift, uncertain whether to back a deal or campaign for another Brexit referendum to overturn the first.
MPs fiercely opposed to crashing out of the EU without a trade deal inflicted two extensions to the withdrawal on the Government, forcing the country into the absurd position of holding elections for the European Parliament while on the cusp of leaving it. As a consequence of May’s parliamentary failures, a pop-up political party led by long-time Eurosceptic campaigner Nigel Farage emerged and won those European elections. The Tories were embarrassingly pushed into fifth place. The Brexit Party’s success prompted a series of dramatic events that led to May’s departure from Downing Street and the rapid rise of Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary who led the campaign for the UK to break with the EU. His victory in that summer’s leadership contest was followed by a revised exit deal with the EU. The parliamentary deadlock made an election inevitable and that winter, Johnson went to the country to ask for a mandate to ‘get Brexit Done’.
It was my third general election campaign in ten years as a political journalist, my second at the Financial Times and my first as a front-line political reporter. My rituals for polling day were well developed. All reporting that could impact the result is forbidden, so there is no news. After a year of running ragged, rising late out of bed, exercising and casting my vote at a local primary school in north London, it was a day to have a long lunch with an old friend followed by a luxurious afternoon nap. The working day began at 9 p.m.
Inside Bracken House, the FT’s historic home opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, the newsroom was abuzz. The desks were groaning with sweet treats and cafetières. Among the gaggle of editors and data and graphics experts were my three political reporting colleagues. All of us had spent time on the road and were losing our lucidity after the travails of Brexit, the Tory leadership contest and finally the election campaign. There was a consensus among the team that a solid Johnson victory was the most likely outcome, but I was especially bullish about his chances of pulling off a substantial win. Yet we all wondered whether this could be 2017 again, the previous snap Brexit election when the Labour Party surprised the nation by coming close to governing. Much had changed in the intervening two years, especially the declining standing of opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, but I sensed something was brewing beyond the polls and voxpops that could boost Johnson’s chances.
As winter closed in through late November and December, I had zigzagged across England to figure out whether Johnson was indeed on course for a big win. Across the post-industrial north of England and the landlocked Midlands, the message from voters, activists and campaigners was loud. People were fed up with Westminster, fed up with Brexit and fed up with stagnation. They wanted politics to go away. In large numbers, they appeared to rather like Boris Johnson – particularly his carefully honed optimistic persona. This Old Etonian, Oxford-educated figure was finding purchase in Labour’s traditional working-class heartlands in a way that seemed implausible for someone with his backstory. But in seat after seat, it was hard to conclude anything but that Labour was in deep, deep trouble.
In the newsroom, as the BBC’s election coverage ramped up and the minutes ticked down to the polls closing, the FT’s video crew were trained on me for an instant reaction. Hyped up with coffee, this was the moment where I’d discover whether the thousands of words I had written were accurate or utter rubbish. Anchorman Huw Edwards declared at 10 p.m., ‘Our exit poll suggests there will be a Conservative majority.’ My reaction was a little less studied: ‘Oh my God! they’ve smashed it.’ And by it, I meant the ‘red wall’: whole parts of England that had always supported the Labour Party since its arrival in national politics almost a century ago. Until that night.
Boris Johnson scored the Conservative Party’s first decisive election victory since the 1980s and the days of Margaret Thatcher thanks to parts of the UK that had never voted for his party before. Constituencies in England that were devoted to Labour for generations had shed their voting traditions to return the prime minister back to Downing Street with a mandate to conclude Brexit and reshape the country in his image. It was the most potent and transformative election outcome since 1979. Westminster was agog. But had they paid more attention to voters, they would have realized those who felt disenfranchised were finding their disruptive voice again, just as they had in the 2016 referendum and again in the 2017 election. Their anger did not suddenly erupt. The groundwork had been laid by Theresa May two years previously, but it was the chiefly the culmination of years and decades of neglect by successive governments and politicians.
At 4.35 a.m., when Johnson was clearly heading back to Number 10 with a thumping mandate, the FT’s editor Lionel Barber reminded me via text that I had spotted the fragility of Labour from the start of the campaign: ‘You called the red wall.’ But no one had predicted the sheer scale of Labour’s collapse. The party had suffered its worst election result since 1935. Maybe it was Brexit. Maybe it was Jeremy Corbyn. Or maybe it was something deeper. There was more to this story and the only way to find out was to hit the road, returning to Labour’s former heartlands to find out why so much of the country had decisively broken with the party. And where better to start than the town I still call home, Gateshead.
As well as travelling the country to better understand the people and places that voted Tory for the first time, I wanted to speak to the key political players about the big questions: Boris Johnson and his personal connection to working-class voters, Keir Starmer’s enormous challenges in reshaping Labour, Tony Blair on where his New Labour project succeeded and failed, Nigel Farage on how he personally reshaped British politics and Michael Gove’s views on the future of conservatism. From Alan Johnson to John McDonnell, Norman Tebbit to Michael Heseltine, David Miliband to Ed Miliband, these people are all part of the journey.