Two mega-polls suggest that the Tories are heading for a defeat more catastrophic than they experienced in 1997. What if they’re right?
Reader, I was there. It was shortly after 3am on 2 May 1997 when the Labour celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall turned from noisy exuberance at the prospect of a landslide election victory to unrestrained delirium about the epic scale of the losses being inflicted on the Tories. It was the result from Enfield Southgate that did it. When Michael Portillo, who had been widely tipped to become the next Conservative leader, was evicted from a seat that had previously looked impregnable, the Labour crowd erupted in visceral chanting of: “Out! Out! Out!” Loathed as the pomaded embodiment of the Tory arrogance and division of that era, he was one of seven cabinet ministers who were culled by the electoral reaper that night.
For his entertaining blow-by-blow account of events, Brian Cathcart chose the title: Were You Still Up for Portillo? A poll of Channel 4 viewers and Observer readers rated his humiliation “their third favourite moment of the 20th century”, one place ahead of the execution of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Mr Portillo later reinvented himself as the pastel-clad presenter of TV travelogues. While he may have put his election-defining expulsion from parliament behind him, it is still seared into Conservative folk memory.
