Last year, July 4 was a day of celebration in British politics for almost everyone but the Tories. At the general election held on that date, Labour won a commanding 411 parliamentary seats and returned to power after 14 years in opposition. The Liberal Democrats acquired their highest ever seat share. Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK claimed the third largest vote share (but only five seats). Landslides, however, seldom end when polls close. Capturing Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s landslides, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty uses the double-curve of the letter S to suggest that political fortunes, “swing both ways.”
Landslides begin and end unexpectedly. Their routes are unpredictable. In six years, the Conservatives have gone from almost inevitable to almost extinct. A year ago, Starmer was hailed for the centrism for which he is now vilified. To discern direction in this churn, it is helpful to examine the events of 1906: the first landslide election of the twentieth century, and the last triumph of the Liberal Party. The causes and consequences of 1906 illuminate why the Conservatives lost so badly in 2024 and how they could recover, why Labour’s success is shallow and its position precarious, and why a fissiparous politics of many parties may be the new normal.
The 1906 and 2024 landslides were shaped by countervailing landslides five years earlier. In 1900 and 2019, the Conservatives enjoyed a unifying cause. In 1900, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and his Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain (father of later Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain) made the election a referendum on the Boer War. In 2019, “get Brexit done” was Johnson’s cri de coeur. Both issues divided the opposition and damaged its credibility. “Gladstonian” Liberals like David Lloyd George (PM from 1916-22) denounced the Boer War. “Liberal Imperialists” like H.H. Asquith (PM from 1908-1916) supported it. Divided, the Liberals could not be trusted to defend the empire. Jeremy Corbyn, a socialist who shifted Labour left from its recent pro-Europe, pro-business Blairite history, led a party whose MPs supported “Remain” but whose working-class Northern England heartland voted “Leave” in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Divided, Labour could not be trusted to negotiate post-Brexit Anglo-European relations, and voters overwhelmingly opted for “get Brexit done” Boris Johnson instead.
By 1906 and 2024, the Boers were defeated and Brexit was done and the salient issues were dividing the Conservatives instead of their electoral opponents. Joseph Chamberlain broke with Salisbury’s successor (and nephew) as Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, over the latter’s ambivalence on tariffs. Farage, considered an outsider much the same way Joseph Chamberlain was, assailed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak over his vacillating on immigration while offering a stridently anti-immigration message himself. In 1906 and 2024, Liberals and Labour could portray longstanding Conservative governments as synonymous with an economically sluggish status quo and contrast Conservative dissensus with their apparent unity and stability. In both cases, the result was a Conservative wipeout.
In 1906, the Conservatives lost 246 seats while in 2024 they lost 251 seats. Nonetheless, the Conservatives regained 110 seats in the next election in 1910, holding two fewer than the Liberals. In 1918 they won another 108 seats to gain a majority, although they depended on Lloyd George’s “Coalition Liberals” to govern. Issues like increased taxation, industrial strikes, Irish upheaval, and the First World War energized Conservatives but divided Liberals. Embellishing their populist nationalism, the Conservatives rebranded as the “Unionists” in 1911 and replaced the emollient, aristocratic, Balfour with the confrontational, middle class, Andrew Bonar Law. Bonar Law and his equally bourgeois successor as Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, aimed their appeals to the working and middle classes. Styling himself publicly a “plain man of the common people,” Baldwin, claimed (privately) to “voice what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country.”
Today’s Conservatives could also stage a quick recovery by merging with Reform or co-opting its grievances and by elevating a populist firebrand like Farage or Johnson. Such a transformation would be comparable to the high-toned Cecil-Balfour clan ceding leadership to suburbanites like Bonar Law and Baldwin. Then and now, the insurgent can revive the established, and the established can legitimize the insurgent. Emulating the Unionist reimagining of 1911, a new name and branding could facilitate the merger. Following Bonar Law and Baldwin in fusing nationalist and economic populism could be the Conservatives’ path forward. With his promise of socioeconomic “leveling up,” this combination helped Johnson breach Labour’s “Red Wall” of Northern English seats in 2019. Farage’s present calls to nationalize the steel industry and his refusal to criticize striking sanitation workers in Birmingham are similar tactics.
Despite leading Labour to victory in 2024, Starmer now faces a swift decline in popularity, raising questions about the durability of his mandate. Similarly, when the Liberals won their greatest victory in 1906, winning 397 seats and what would be their last parliamentary majority, it seemed that the Liberal party and their individual-rights oriented form of politics was ascendant. Instead, across 20th-century Europe, class-oriented parties of right and left supplanted liberal ones. Grounded in ideas of individual freedom rather than class interests, the Liberals could appeal to many but secure the support of few. The Liberals enacted social welfare legislation in 1909-1910, but their working class support was eroded by Labour’s more ambitious welfare agenda. Liberal governments deployed troops against domestic strikes and Russian Bolsheviks, but the middle and upper classes saw the Tories as a stronger bulwark against communism.
Today Labour runs the same risk of falling between stools. Starmer promised both fiscal discipline and economic growth, but has only antagonized supporters with abortive attempts at social welfare retrenchment. “Blue Labour” proposals to tack right on social issues and left on economic ones risks the appearance of insincerity with all constituencies. Labour suffered losses to the Greens and left-wing independents in 2024. Disenchanted progressive voters may abandon Labour en masse next election. For voters concerned with fiscal rectitude, the Conservatives, heirs to former British finance minister George Osborne’s “austerity” economics under David Cameron, are a safer harbor. For voters animated by national sovereignty, Reform is the clear choice, while voters interested in reintegrating with Europe will support the Liberal Democrats. In struggling to be acceptable to everyone, Labour could end up appealing to almost no one.
The aftermath of 1906 also suggests that 2024 could herald parliamentary fragmentation. In 1906, 90 percent of the electorate voted Liberal or Conservative. Labor’s emergence that year with 5 percent of the vote presaged change. In the four elections of the 1920s, at least three parties received more than 10 percent of the vote. A two-party binary only reemerged in 1931. In 2017, Labor and the Conservatives took 80 percent of the vote. That proportion fell to 66 percent in 2024. More Britons voted Reform, LibDem, and Green combined than Labor or Conservative separately. Recent polling showed 26 percent support for Reform, 23 percent for Labor, 18 percent for the Conservatives, 15 percent for the LibDems, and 10 percent for the Greens.
No matter the century, landslides are best interpreted not as one party’s success in one election, but as periods of instability in which soaring victories, crushing defeats, and unthinkable results become plausible. Outlandish outcomes like a Farage premiership, Reform-Conservative fusion, or Labour extinction should be acknowledged and analyzed. A mushrooming of parliamentary parties is a strong possibility. Britain may not love coalitions, but today, as in 1906, it may have to learn to endure them, at least until Britain can decide once again what it stands for.
