Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: general election, Keir Starmer, sadiq khan

That Was The General Election, Wandering Round Westminster At 2am

At the count for the General Election came in last night, I found myself wandering around Whitehall. This is what happened.

Rich Johnston, founder of Bleeding Cool, is a British political cartoonist. This is the eighth of a number of columns that ran around the General Election that was held by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland yesterday on July 4th.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had a General Election last night. It returned the Labour Party to government with the largest majority of MPs ever gathered by one party since the mid-nineteenth century, with Sir Keir Starmer as our Prime Minister. However, it did so with a relatively low vote, as the Conservative Party, previously in government, saw their vote halved by the populist right win Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. Who, despite getting a sizeable percentage of the vote, only returned four out of 650 MPs – far fewer than the 14 promised by the BBC exit poll. The Liberal Democrats, on a smaller share, got 71 seats. And the Conservative Party, just above Reform, had 121 seats. Labour has, at this moment, with a few stragglers still to come in, 410 out of 650 seats. An unassailable position for the next five years. Although saying that, Boris Johnson, with a greater percentage of the vote, and still a very large majority of MPs, lasted a mere three years. So who knows?

I left a comics pub last night with the likes of Colleen Douglas, Ram V, Kieron Gillen, Rian Hughes and the like, once the exit poll had come in and we knew which way this was going. I wandered past Downing Street to find this surreal sight.

On the way to meet a friend at the Cinnamon Cub in Whitehall/Westminster, the governmental suburb of London, for one of their late-night sessions, I noticed that the lights were on at the neighbouring right-wing think tank, the Adam Smith Institute.

Chancing my luck, I just walked in to find an all-night party with themed drinks, party whistles, posing backdrops and a watching party upstairs.

Chatting with people, they seemed generally quite chipper; if resigned to a massive loss of a Conservative Party, they were buoyed by the rise of Reform.

However, with the Labour Party on track for an unassailable victory, some were already planning their exit to the United States of America. This did inspire me to draw the following cartoon, however.

But that was when I was sat in the Cinnamon, waiting for a table that never emerged. Their systems were down, including the Wi-Fi for the big screen with the BBC 1 election night count.

So my friend and I did the only decent thing and let them use my phone as a hotspot to stream from. Apparently, no one else there, including one Labour chief of staff, had thought to do such a thing. We left in search of actual food to the sounds of screams as the Wi-Fi cut out. This does not bode well.

It was 2 a.m., and the Adam Smith Institute had given up the game and closed its doors. But I bumped into London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who was in a buoyant mood and heading to be interviewed by Channel 4 News. It was that kind of a night.

I got home to watch big-name politicians like former Prime Minister Liz Truss, Jacob Rees Mogg, and Grant Shapps lose their seats, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, now standing as an independent, fighting off his Labour opponent, and Labour's Jess Phillips almost losing her seat to an independent candidate fighting on a pro-Gaza ticket, Labour not being seen as sufficiently anti-Israel on this matter. She was booed at the count, and similar fights in other constituencies may have dulled Labour's overall percentage, and it is a situation that Keir Starmer is going to have to deal with. Taking back 2/3 of the Scottish Nationalist Party seats might have helped though.

So what happens now? The Tories will tear themselves apart, the left of Labour will do the same, there will be a rearrangement of the political landscape, and Nigel Farage will take his place with his three Reform colleagues in Parliament arguing for a form of proportional representation. And maybe trying to merge with the Tories to form… ConForm? It could happen.

But here's the thing. Even with a resurgence of Reform, if you took the Conservative and Reform vote together, an alliance that proportional representation would deliver, it would still be less than the left alliance that might be Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Green together. If Nigel Farage pushes for and gets electoral reform, he may well benefit his own political ambition, but it would still keep him out of power. Basically, last night, writ large across the next five years. Still, it could be worse…

The Adam Smith Institute may have another candidate they may want to push into Number Ten!

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!