How the slow death of Labour might happen

“CAN anyone work this thing?” Paul Nuttall barks, jabbing the touch screen. He rues the day his aides talked him into travelling by self-driving car. “It will make you look prime ministerial,” they said. Bollocks. It just makes him look like a hypocrite after all those speeches about the evils of job-killing robots. This robot just drove him from London to Stoke without crashing—is functioning air-conditioning too much to ask? It is an unusually hot April day. Mr Nuttall grimaces as he spots his signature tweed jacket and flat cap on the seat next to him; shortly he will have to put them on for a photo with constituents.

Or perhaps his perspiration is just nerves. For the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and now leader of the opposition, has much to be nervous about. The 2030 election is weeks away. He could end up as prime minister, at the helm of a UKIP-Conservative coalition. How far he has come since 2016, that fateful year in which Britain voted to leave the EU and he was elected UKIP leader. Woozy with campaign tiredness and with a few minutes to go before he arrives at Stoke’s marketplace, a dilapidated Victorian pavilion now overshadowed by a colossal Independence Day monument to Brexit, he closes his eyes and recalls the first time he stumped there.

That was way back in January 2017. Tristram Hunt, the local Labour MP, had just resigned to run the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mr Nuttall, a former academic born into a working-class family in Liverpool, seized the moment. His authoritarian social views, anti-EU purism and attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left, London-centric Labour Party charmed the pro-Brexit town of former pottery and steel workers. At the by-election on February 23rd it made him its first non-Labour MP since 1950.

His campaign coincided with a development that would enable him to turn this one gain (UKIP’s first, defections excepted) into the 131 seats his party now holds. Horrified by the polling in places like Stoke, Mr Corbyn obliged Labour MPs to vote for Brexit when it was put to Parliament in February 2017. The move appalled his left-wing backers: once-supportive journalists like Owen Jones and George Monbiot slated him; loyal front-benchers resigned; some 2,000 members of the Grassroots Labour group signed an angry letter. Even the Canary, a slavishly Corbynista website, attacked its man. In subsequent months, as Theresa May’s talks in Brussels came to little, the chorus of dissatisfaction in Labour mounted.

The final straw came in early 2019 when expensive Labour billboards went up around the country bearing a message from “Jemery Cobryn”. This was one unforced error too many. Union leaders and shadow-cabinet die-hards filed in to tell Mr Corbyn that he no longer had their support. Demoralised and exhausted, Labour’s leader resigned, bequeathing a record-low 19% poll standing to Emily Thornberry, the former shadow foreign secretary who since early 2017 had trodden a subtly less pro-Brexit path than her boss.

Thanks to the distorting effect of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, Labour’s 20% vote share on May 7th 2020 gave it 155 seats of the 600 available. The Liberal Democrats, targeting Mrs Thornberry’s cosmopolitan base by calling for a referendum on rejoining the EU, took 23 seats on 15%. UKIP, eating into Labour’s working-class strongholds, took 17% of votes and 18 seats. “This is a revolution!” Nigel Farage, Mr Nuttall’s predecessor, told reporters on a visit to London. (Privately the UKIP leader wished that Secretary of State Farage had stayed in Washington.)

Appalled by their party’s decline, the few remaining moderate Labour MPs quit and formed a new party based on “En Marche!”, the movement that had propelled the centrist Emmanuel Macron to France’s presidency in May 2017. “On The Move!” (OTM!) was bolstered by a series of defections by liberal Tories fed up with Mrs May’s hard Brexit. It went on to win a series of sensational by-election victories in big cities and well-off suburbs. An electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats became a formal alliance, then a merger. A seminal moment was the first of three live debates hosted by Facebook in April 2025, when Mr Nuttall and Jess Phillips, the plain-spoken former Labour MP now leading OTM!, together dismantled Mrs Thornberry and Mrs May.

The subsequent election would be the nail in Labour’s coffin. In 2025 the party ceded most of its metropolitan seats to OTM!, now endorsed by several centrist unions and most Labour grandees. With inequality rising and wages stagnant, the post-industrial heartlands switched as one to UKIP, which campaigned for “real” immigration cuts, the renegotiation of recent trade deals and a referendum on reinstating the death penalty. Mrs Thornberry resigned and her party, now on 43 seats, became the fifth-largest in the Commons after the Tories, UKIP, OTM! and the Scottish National Party. It fell to Mr Nuttall to interrogate Mrs May across the dispatch box.

Going gentle into that good night

Five more years on, Labour’s death is moments away. Polls suggest UKIP will come first in the 2030 election, narrowly followed by the Tories and, just behind them, OTM!. Mrs Phillips says Britain must rejoin the European single market; she should be able to form a government backed by the Tories and Scottish Nationalists if she can persuade Labour to stand down its candidates. If she cannot then UKIP will probably come first and be invited by King William to form a government, supported by the Tories.

“How long should I wait before I invite President Trump to London?” Mr Nuttall ponders to himself. “Is seven days too soon? And should I call her Mrs President or Ivanka?” As his car sweeps onto Stoke’s marketplace, his phone begins to ring. He answers: “Yes. Labour have done what? What did Phillips offer them? Nothing? Jesus. OK.” He hangs up, swears under his breath, and opens the car door to a wall of cheers.