May 1997

The Tories have finally been driven from office! Humiliated, they have scuttled from
power. It was an earth-shattering defeat that will open a new round of bitter civil war
over who will succeed John Major. Every worker who has lost their job, every young person
who has been denied a future, all those who have been driven into the ground for the past
18 years will be over the moon. The demise of the Tory government is being celebrated from
one end of the country to the other.

Labour has scored an historic landslide victory in the 1997 general election. The scale
of the Tory defeat is unparalleled in modern history. In the words of former Tory cabinet
minister, Douglas Hurd, "this is a meltdown." In fact meltdown is probably a
vast underestimation of the hole the Tories now find themselves in. Only the Duke of
Wellington has presided over a worse defeat for the Tories – and that was in 1832!