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Author: Anushka Asthana
ISBN No:
Review date: 23/06/2026
No of pages: 320
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publisher URL:
https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/taken-as-red-how-labour-won-big-and-the-tories-crashed-the-party-anushka-asthana-1
Year of publication: 30/09/2024
Brief:
price
£14.99, ebook
Anushka Asthana the author is a career political journalist, who has become deputy political editor at ITV News. Regrettably like many books, even by big-name publishers, the hardback lacks an index.
The book has two themes, that together serve to explain the July 2024 general election result: one, how the Conservatives by the ‘chaos’ (page 6) of their years in government lost to heavily; and, not quite the same thing, how Labour won so heavily. She quotes early on (page 27) a fellow political journalist, the yet more experienced Robert Peston, who described Sir Keir Starmer as ‘much more ruthless than Tony Blair’. On a personal level, she hears, Starmer is anything but ruthless; it’s on a professional level, that he is, and indeed, admitted it outright in interview with her. Where, if anywhere does this apply to readers of Professional Security Magazine, other than they may have voted for or against Sir Keir’s party on July 4?
The Labour Party had to show unity to voters, to win enough votes, beyond satisfying the relative minority of party members. Trouble-makers of any stripe, whether left-wingers in the party or protesters outside, had to be shown as separate from the Labour Party which thus looks fit to govern. Hence at the Labour conference in Liverpool in autumn 2023, Asthana describes how Starmer ‘burst out of the ACC [the city centre venue, stewarded and guarded by the private security contractor Carlisle Support Services] in a shirt still flecked with the glitter thrown on him by a protester inside’. Starmer had just given his keynote speech. As an aside, to leave Asthana for a moment, and as some to do with the guarding of Sir Keir remarked to me, what if the protester had not carried glitter, but acid or a knife or gun? Two replies. The first is that the search regime at such venues serves to take out of the equation such a concern; the same as, stadiums over the years have fairly routinely got phoned-in threats of a bomb. It doesn’t get publicised, partly so as not to incentivise the hoaxers; partly, because the stadium security can ignore the threat with confidence – they know the searching means that the threat is baseless. Hence the glitter-thrower used glitter partly because it made the point of protest, and was handily photogenic; partly, it did not expose the protester to the risk of prosecution, as an assault with a knife or even tomato soup might.
Minute’s silence
Even earlier in the book, setting the scene, Asthana describes the 2022 Labour conference when the party’s leaders felt it vital to show a minute’s silence to the late Queen Elizabeth II, and then to sing the national anthem. Those in charge watched nervously as it duly happened without incident (that would have appeared disrespectful, and would have been ammunition to those who would wish the party ill at any opportunity). The downside, as Asthana shows, is a Stalinist dragooning of the audience (page 15). It’s reminiscent of the famous passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s great chronicle of Stalinist prisons, The Gulag Archipielago, when a political meeting of Russian Communists clapping Stalin didn’t dare stop clapping, for fear the first to stop would be arrested as an enemy. To return to Asthana: “All delegates were searched comprehensively on arrival at the Liverpool ACC and given a warning that any shouting would result in their passes being shredded …. Everyone recognised how critical the moment was.”
Asthana identifies the crucial attribute, that counts for politicians in any era, anywhere: control, whether making sure people don’t do something (heckle) or making sure they do do something (maintain a minute’s silence in memory of the late QE2). The same, interestingly, goes in the broadcast media covering national politics. Asthana begins her book on the evening of polling day, July 4, ‘with a strict instruction that the address of this central London location must remain secret – for reasons of security’. Similarly on entry she’s handed a bright pink wristband and is led ‘along a corridor to an area flanked by security guards’. Besides location, knowledge is valuable, and has to be protected, presumably so that it can’t be leaked to opposition broadcasters or used to place bets. At 9.30pm; that is, shortly before polling stations close and the business of the night begins, a ‘key small group who had all signed non-disclosure agreements’ is told of the ‘seat projections’ and the expected colossal Labour majority.
What next?
So much for winning in July; what will Labour do with their power; or will they merely be in office? Asthana quotes (page 76) a Starmer supporter’s belief that Starmer as a former DPP ‘had a visceral understanding of voters’ concerns about crime’. To leave Asthana for a moment, given that you can easily find police and others who will say that we cannot arrest our way out of fraud, or retail theft, or any number of crimes (except rape, and murder, presumably because it would sound too callous), someone inside the criminal justice system may be the last person to have original ideas to reduce crime.
Governing
In a brief closing chapter titled ‘Governing’, Asthana traces ‘the reality of the challenges’ (page 291) such as the midsummer anti-immigrant riots. Asthana states the ‘mission on crime’ of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper: ‘to tackle serious violence, including against women and girls’ and to increase the number of neighbourhood police officers. Asthana as a political journalist makes no effort to critique this; to do so ourselves only briefly, the lack of any target or process in terms of violence, the uncomfortable fact that good intentions are at the mercy of acts such as the Southport stabbings to death; and that you can have thousands more cops (assuming you can recruit them) but that by itself does nothing to address the volume crimes of fraud and theft from shops.
Mood
If as Asthana writes ‘an anti-politics mood has increasingly gripped parts of the nation’ (page 297; again, she’s vague; which parts, whether geographical or by age or gender?), that may be because Starmer’s Labour seemed as focused on gaining power as Boris Johnson’s Conservatives seemed focused on staying there, without actually mending pot-holes, literal and metaphorical. As for ‘delivery’ on which Starmer like any politician will be judged, of note is businessman James Timpson appointed as minister of state for ‘prisons, probation and reducing reoffending’ (page 300) and Asthana’s interpretation of Martyn’s Law (page 301), ‘relating to safety at public venues’ in terms of ‘voters have seen scandal after scandal without anyone being held to account’.
