You never know when it’s going to hit you. I spent six weeks covering the election campaign, for this newspaper and others, and I knew that a Labour landslide was coming. I watched the exit poll drop at 10pm last Thursday and saw that it predicted a Labour landslide.
I stayed up until 7.30am watching Conservative MPs fall one by one, big beasts and garden variety goblins alike. Replacing most of them were box-fresh Labour MPs. I slept and watched Keir Starmer give his speech outside 10 Downing Street. I was glued to Twitter as he announced his first cabinet appointments.
Still, none of it truly felt real. In the end, what did it for me was the news that James Timpson, the key cutting magnate, would join the Lords and become prisons minister. Here was a man who had spent years and decades thinking about rehabilitation, and how to pull people out of the various vicious cycles life had thrown them into.
He was a successful business owner, sure, but had always used his wealth and booming company to help those in need of a way out. Soon, he will be a government minister, putting everything he has learnt in the private sector to good use. I never thought that the appointment of a prisons minister could make me teary but well, it wasn’t a regular week.
I’d also never experienced something like this in my adult life; a person getting appointed to the House of Lords only for the right reasons. It was an odd feeling; hope and optimism.
It’s fair to say that it took rather less time to absorb the results of the French legislative elections on Sunday. I’d woken up with a knot already firmly in my stomach, worried that the far right would somehow end up getting an absolute majority, or at least a large enough majority that they would be able to form a government.
I spent the afternoon deep cleaning my flat – something I very much do not do often enough in normal times – in order to keep my mind off the results. At 6pm, an hour before the exit poll was due to come out, I ran out of the flat and decided to go do some laps around my local park. I just couldn’t stand to be still.
In the end, I needn’t have worried. The Front Populaire – a union of centre-left to far-left parties – ended up becoming the largest bloc in the National Assembly. The second belonged to Macron’s party. Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale came in at a somewhat distant third.
The result was frustrating in some ways, as no-one managed to get an absolute majority, meaning that the mother of all parliamentary deadlocks is surely coming for France, but god, it was a relief. Even without enough centrist and centre-right voters deciding to do the grown-up thing and vote tactically, the left-wing coalition still came first.
Most importantly, Marine Le Pen and her ilk have been put back in their box – for now. French waters will be choppier than their British counterparts in weeks and months to come, but I’ll take chaos over fascism any day.
In the meantime, I and other Franco-British mongrels have yet another stressful week on our hands. Somehow both our countries managed to reach the semi finals of the Euros. How? It’s not entirely clear, given that neither played particularly scintillating football to get there. Then again, perhaps that’s what we ought to have learnt from Starmer’s stodgy, boring campaign and France’s messy election results.
You can’t always get what you want, and victory doesn’t always present itself in the way that you would have wanted it to. When it does, you simply have to welcome it, drink it in and celebrate the fact that it happened at all. I’ll raise a glass to that.
