Boris has won. This is a dark day. My friend Kiran has a good pre-emptive piece on how we got here and what Gordon Brown needs to do next.
On Comment is Free, Jonathan Freedland tells it like it is, poetically:
“On a sunny Friday in May, by the glittering waters of the Thames, Tony Blair famously declared that a “new dawn” had broken. Yesterday, exactly 11 years later, and once again on the banks of the Thames, Labour ushered in what will surely be its new dusk.”
Meanwhile, into my inbox this morning clattered an email from Compass, the left-wing pressure group. It sits there still, shaking and clamouring with frustration: “New Labour is now dead. The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished.
The atrocious results from last night clearly show that the Blairite strategy, revived by Gordon Brown, of targeting middle class votes while assuming the working class would back the Party come what may, no longer holds.”
