Jo Swinson and Chuka Umunna were rivals in the field of suicidal opportunism. Now they are both politically dead

On a slightly merrier election night long ago, schadenfreude was the cherry on the cake.

In the early hours of 2 May 1997, a tidal wave of joy flooded every nook and cranny of the nation when the returning officer in Enfield Southgate announced Michael Portillo’s demise.

No one will ever publish a best seller entitled “Were You Still Up For Jo Swinson?”. For one thing, few of us will have had the stomach to stay up until news of her defeat to the SNP in Dunbartonshire East broke. For another, it was hardly cause for ecstatic whooping and drunken laps of honour around the garden even for those stoics who did. She was never big or horrid enough for that.

Still, anyone who heroically waded through the carnage until about 4am had more than earned a dollop of morose satisfaction at the roughness of the justice.

Political scientists will identify several factors that aligned to create this result. Swinson’s catastrophic misjudgment in enabling the election in the first place will be one of them.

She thought she was being cute when she chose to put the Liberal Democrats behind this election, and bounced Jeremy Corbyn into doing the same. There was not the slightest need for it. She could have left Johnson on the rack, and watched him writhe in agony, if not his death throes, in that fabled Brexit ditch of his.

Instead, she trusted in the polls. They told her that in swathes of Tory-held seats across the south and southwest, the immediate future would be orange. Private polling assured her that the self-evidently indefensible idea of unilaterally revoking Article 50 was a populist masterstroke.

You have to be either exceedingly brave or galactically dumb to bet the farm on opinion polls six weeks before an election held at a time of extreme volatility. History will judge which of the two she was. This first draft plumps confidently for the latter.

This election was her conception as much as Boris Johnson’s. Swinson wasn’t the first woman to yield to Johnson’s desire and live to regret it, but she is the first to leave him holding the baby – and a prouder father you couldn’t wish to spend the next five years trying to avoid.

If Swinson faintly brought to mind one of Miss Jean Brodie’s less precocious gels, she was hardly la creme de la creme. She leaves behind her a party shipwrecked by her arrogant shunning of a generational opportunity to reshape the centre and centre-left into an effective anti-Tory alliance. With the ball sat invitingly on the spot, the Chris Waddle of austerity-supporting Tory fellow travellers blazed wildly over from 12 yards.

She will no more be missed than her leading rival in the field of suicidal opportunism. Chuka Umunna’s bespoke moulding of his career into a madcap political pub crawl is over too. First, the man identified (by a person or persons unknown at his law firm) in his Wikipedia entry as “the British Obama” partied like it was 1997. When life as the self-anointed heir of the Blairite legacy lost its savour, he founded a new party. When change came too slowly, this recidivist rat broke new ground by jumping aboard what quickly proved, thanks to the titanic incompetence of its captain, to be a sinking ship.

Other Lib Dem newbies will leave more of a hole. What Sam Gyimah imagined he was doing in the Conservative Party in the first place is a 27 pipe mystery, as with any relatively civilised and humane Tory. But he sacrificed his place in it, and a safe Surrey seat, for a point of principle rather than naked careerism. He deserved a better outcome than Swinson’s shallow imbecility could deliver.

So did Luciana Berger, whose courage and resilience in the face of unspeakable antisemitic abuse – from Labour members and others – went unrewarded by the good electors of Finchley and Golders Green.

For poignancy, however, the laurels go to the rejection in Bolsover of Dennis Skinner, the onetime miner and personification of the traditional Labour values that have gone so drastically out of vogue. That his defeat formally cemented the Conservative majority seemed a little on the nose by way of symbolism.

Had he held on, Skinner would have become the Father of the House in succession to the immeasurably lamented Ken Clarke. That he leaves the Commons after just shy of half a century is in large part down to Swinson.

She was the Baby of the House once. The enduring sadness for her party, not to mention her country, is that she never quite grew up.