How some of the front pages reported Labour’s victory

GRUMPS from left and right started scratching the paintwork on Sir Keir Starmer’s shiny new majority as soon as he parked it in Downing Street. It’s wide but shallow; it touches the sky but has no foundation, they carped.

I’ll tell you what it is.

It’s 412 seats as opposed to 121 for the Conservatives, whom we can now detain in a darkened room for the internecine pursuit of bellowing and biting.

Combined with 72 seats for the Lib-Dems, with a special sitting place reserved for frolicsome leader Sir Ed Davey on a unicycle or in a bumper car or something suitably wacky, that leaves around 500 of the 650 or so seats in this parliament held by politicians on the centre or centre-left.

Talk about getting your country back! We shall return to the usual owners of that phrase in a lowlier paragraph.

Starmer isn’t exciting and thank heavens for that. We’ve had it with Tory prime ministers bursting in one door only to slink out the other. We’ve had it with the rambunctious, wayward vanity of Boris Johnson; the weird glassy-eyed detachment of Liz Truss and her amazing economy-destroying work experience premiership.

Johnson now lectures from the sidelines on how to save the party he helped to destroy; while Truss wrote a book on how to save the west but couldn’t even save her own seat.

Now that was a moment to savour, along with the departure of Jacob Rees-Mogg and others too gloriously numerous to mention.

Rishi Sunak led a disastrous campaign, but at least he accepted defeat with a degree of dignity, something he perhaps should have tried out earlier.

But away with the lot of them.

After 14 years of putting up with Tory neglect of infrastructure and public services, after the unnecessary and continuing pain of austerity, after all the non-productive and nasty noise about immigration, after favours done for mates, after endless culture war spats about nothing, we no longer have to listen.

Tellingly, Starmer’s cabinet contains the most ever ministers educated in comprehensive schools. So no more one-sided lessons from the privileged majority for the rest of us. And that cabinet also contains “the most female ministers in history, including the first ever female chancellor in Rachel Reeves”, as today’s Observer puts it.

Starmer has said he wishes to prioritise “getting stuff done” over tribal politics. A different approach but quietly reassuring after so much tribal shin-kicking and shit-stirring.

Too many speeches of the past 14 years might have been written by the editors of the right-wing press. As for those newspapers, lately they have outdone Cassandra in prophesising doom and dismay, only to see Labour win handsomely.

Whisper it quietly, and hopefully, but perhaps the loudmouths of the right are losing their voice.

One thing Starmer has already got done is the scrapping of Sunak’s immoral and highly costly Rwanda plan to reduce the number of small boat crossings.

What a cruel waste of time, focus and energy that scheme was. And now it’s gone.

Nigel Farage and Reform UK won’t be happy about that, and there’ll be endless noise from that end of the room now that Farage is an MP at his eighth attempt.

The media, and particularly the BBC, has been obsessed with Farage for years. He’s been indulged and courted endlessly by the Beeb and fawned over by the bully boys of the right-wing press, and all that attention has finally put a far-right politician in Parliament.

The BBC should now pay him as much attention as it does the Greens, winners of four seats to Farage’s five. And it should give far more attention to the Lib-Dems, who were massively more successful.

Farage will cause trouble for the Tories and for Labour. That’s what he does. All he knows.

Both parties need a plan on how to muzzle that man, but stepping further right, trying to out-Nigel Nigel, just won’t work.

Incidentally, the never knowingly less than awful Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson complains about the BBC calling Reform UK ‘far right’. Well, that’s what they are – and Farage’s aim has always been to smudge the difference and to make the far right seem acceptable, and to seduce the mainstream right into accepting his vile views.

Anyway, early days and all that. I’m happy to admire Starmer’s paintwork, scratches and all, and give him time to settle in and get on with a job to which he seems surprisingly well suited.

The rows will come, the disappointments with follow. But that’s only to be expected. For now everything looks brighter than it has for 14 years.

Critics from left and right chunter that Starmer won what was in essence an anti-Tory victory.

Well, good luck to him: someone had to boot that lot out.