Hundreds of thousands of Mersey voters keep the red flag flying here
HE might have come second, but Jeremy Corbyn emerged today as the conquering hero in the great waste-of-time £143m general election.
The Labour leader, like a modern day Pied Piper was unquestionably buoyed by an army of voters aged 18 to 25 - a record 72 percent of them turning out to vote.
Instead of landslide losses, Corbyn ended the day with 262 seats.
In terms of numbers of votes he took 40 percent of the share. No other Labour leader - apart from Tony Blair in his landslide of 2001 - has come close to that in the last half century.
The 68-year-old achieved a voter percentage increase of 9.6 percent for his party. The only Labour leader who has ever beaten that was Clement Attlee in 1945.
Jeremy Corbyn has just increased Labour's share of the vote more than any other leader in any other election since Attlee in 1945 pic.twitter.com/CwcHzHZ04q
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) June 9, 2017
Corbyn has the Conservatives against him, virtually the entire mainstream media, the business world, oh and a considerable number of his own Labour MPs, including most Merseyside MPs.
Many with the broad church of the Labour Party must be speculating today on what might have been had the disgruntled given Corbyn the full support a leader is entitled too.
Despite them, he has consolidated and strengthened his position in the top job, perhaps, at last, silencing those who spent their energies dismissing his ability to lead.
Yay freedom for Tooting ✌️
— Robert Lindsay (@RobertLindsay) June 9, 2017
While Conservative seats were falling up and down the country, Liverpool lived up to its reputation for keeping the red flag flying.
The count at the Wavertree Tennis centre was nothing more than a formality, so much so that watching the votes being sorted, knowing the outcome from the very start, was a bit like watching paint dry.
Elsewhere in the centre, many politico types huddled around a television screen to watch Theresa May’s grand plans for a mandate collapse spectacularly.
It was probably sticks of rock all round when her party took Southport from the Lib Dems. Long serving MP and former council leader John Pugh retired, giving the Tories the chance to nip in and grab the seat.
As a counter balance they lost Weaver Vale, which covers part of Runcorn New Town, to Labour.
Margaret Greenwood was the comfortable winner in Wirral West where the Tories had nurtured high hopes of their man, Tony Caldeira, nicking the seat back after Esther McVey lost it in 2015. McVey is back in the Tory political fold, winning George Osborne's old Tatton seat.
In Liverpool, the Conservatives are a long way from posing any threat, but they did come second in all five constituencies with an increased vote, moving from third place to second in Riverside and Walton.
UKIP only contested Wavertree where, in 2015, they were third with 3,375 votes. Yesterday UKIP was the last of five, their vote collapsing to just 216.
UKIP, the party that fought for almost 30 years to bring Britain out of the EU, failed to win a single seat in Westminster. Its leader, Bootle-born Paul Nuttall, announced today he was stepping down from the job with immediate effect after failing to be elected in Boston, Lincs.
I am absolutely honoured to have been elected Labour MP for Liverpool Walton. A huge thanks to everyone who supported the campaign. — Dan Carden (@Dan4Walton) June 9, 2017
Louise Ellman (Liverpool Riverside), Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood), Luciana Berger (Wavertree) and Stephen Twigg (West Derby) all romped home with massive support, Ellman and Eagle each winning more than 40,000 votes each, ditto Peter Dowd in Bootle.
Joining them in the Commons is Dan Carden, the man Mayor Joe Anderson said he would not work with over the way he was picked as candidate to replace metro mayor Steve Rotheram.
It would appear that the people of Walton don’t share the mayor’s resistance to their new duly elected Member of Parliament. Carden won 36,174 votes, compared to the 31,222 Rotheram picked up in 2015.
