The rush to draw parallels between the 1997 Labour landslide after 18 years of government by a Conservative Party at civil war and, er, a potential Labour landslide in 2024 after 14 years of government by a Conservative Party at civil war is officially on. The trouble with this convenient analogy is that there are so few parallels other than the one just mentioned.
The number of Commons seats might end up being comparable, if the polling turns out to be correct (a mighty 20-point lead to wet Keir Starmer’s whistle with a Labour rebirth in the key battlegrounds of Scotland and “deep England”) but, as ever, history turns out to be not so neat.
By almost any economic, cultural and social metric, the battlegrounds of these elections 27 years apart are as distinct as Waterloo and Yemen. The politics, too, are different, although the Conservative Party of 1997 shared the same sense of fatigue that besets it today.
John Major was the beneficiary of the palace coup by which all others shall be judged, when MPs defenestrated Margaret Thatcher in 1990, but Major at least went into 1997 having won an election five years earlier.
Rishi Sunak is the prime minister three-times removed from a mandate, having led the counter-revolution to Liz Truss’s insurgency, which itself overturned Boris Johnson who — though winning in 2019— had come to office by turfing out Theresa May, who had herself acceded after the resignation of David Cameron.
When it comes to disruptors, this lot make Major’s enemies look like amateurs. Major faced down one direct challenge in 1995, but by comparison, Sunak is about as secure as a branch of Foot Locker in a riot.
It is also true that in 1997 they were in a state of fissure over Britain’s relationship with Europe, the Tories’ ideological woodworm. Major called the Eurosceptics who undermined him within even his own Cabinet “The Bastards”. The legacy of Cameron’s Brexit vote was that “The Bastards” ended up running the country and 2024 will be their reckoning.
Major was often mocked for being dull and wonkish (ironically, Starmer is more like him than Tony Blair), yet posterity has been kind, and he is widely considered an effective leader who bequeathed a very rosy outlook to the man who crushed him in 1997.
Major and his chancellor Ken Clarke got the country out of the mess caused by the Exchange Rate Mechanism meltdown in 1992 with such success that when Labour came to power they walked straight into a boom (as well as Major laying the groundwork for peace in Northern Ireland).
So Major could at least point to a bright future in 1997 — Sunak has nothing to offer by comparison. Even fire-sale tax cuts cannot disguise a picture of long-term stagnation and seemingly relentless pessimism.
Whereas whoever won in 1997 could confidently promise more investment, Brexit and Covid have nobbled the country’s ability to provide basic services across health, policing, transport, housing, social care and education. That these crises followed the policies of austerity under Cameron means there is so much less left to build back from.
Starmer has conceded as much. “Broken Britain” has often been a lazy slogan for lazy commentators, but the problem for Sunak’s campaign is that so much of our infrastructure is broken and people see it crumbling every day.
Sunak is also going to the polls with a party that is discredited on intellectual and ethical grounds. Major faced years of “sleaze” scandals involving MPs who were shown to be either petty crooks or adulterous liars.
The perception of the Conservatives in 2024 is even worse, especially in the light of the Covid procurement scandals. The hand-held plough of Nineties Tory sleaze has evolved into a combine harvester of corruption and cronyism.
And whereas Major had a few reliable grandees to call on like Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind, Sunak has had to pick his Cabinet from the political equivalent of mechanically reclaimed meat.
It’s notoriously difficult to accurately identify something as intangible as a national mood, but a good guess in 2024 would be profound unhappiness. The country feels battered by the past 10 years in particular, since the Brexit vote showed us just how divided we were.
It’s fitting that the Labour leader likely to take power with a majority that could match Blair’s has none of Blair’s dash or charisma. We are a significantly more disconnected country: in the Union, the regions, urban and rural, across generations, identities and religions than we were in 1997.
Blair was Henry VIII to Major’s Henry VII, a young and charismatic leader inheriting a country with stuffed coffers and a sense of renewed vigour. Starmer presents an altogether more sober future (Cromwellian perhaps?) and well he might. Blair was able to bask in a post-Cold War peace in which the US was the unchallenged superpower. Starmer will walk into No 10 with the potential for global conflict as great as at any time since the Thirties. We must all pray we are not living in what will one day be known as pre-war Britain.
The Nineties were the last decade of something approaching a monoculture, before Google and social media, when television and music were mass, shared experiences. However you view the quality of British culture in the Nineties, the mix of prosperity (affordable housing!) and positivity provided a startingly different feel to 2024. We didn’t know it then, but 1997 was a high watermark for this somewhat mythologised optimism.
Britpop was ubiquitous, but it had become a boorish parody of itself (Oasis third album, Be Here Now, was the sound of the slow slide into a gammon-to-be, cocaine-hooligan culture).
The Young British Artists were the powerful establishment, the Spice Girls had gone global and two days after the election the UK crowned its last Eurovision Song Contest winner. The osmosis of magazines, lad culture and a kind of codified intoxication had already absorbed football, in England at least, when Euro 96 had become like a nation dancing drunk round the maypole.
Just around the corner were 9/11 and Iraq, as was the gradual but inexorable atomisation of British culture that’s contributed to the collective nervous breakdown we’re experiencing.
In 1997 Britain was animated and wondering what tomorrow might bring. In 2024 it is bruised. Blair administered the uppers, but Starmer must administer real medicine.
The biggest difference is that the 2024 narrative is still about the ever-decreasing circles of the Conservatives. Sir Simon Clarke, the MP who made the most recent challenge to Sunak’s leadership, said: “No one likes to be the guy shouting ‘Iceberg’.”
Rather cutely, Titanic was released in 1997. This year’s expected Labour landslide will be motivated by resentment, whereas 27 years ago the story was all about the potential of a shiny new government. We’ve gone from an excited “Let’s go!” to an exhausted “Just go”.
One last thing for anyone under 35 out there. The world and his dog swore blind that 1997 marked the final collapse of the Conservative Party. But they’ll come back. They always do. That’s one of the few lessons of history you can rely on.
