‘Lib Dems target Jeremy Hunt for their own Portillo moment in the Blue Wall’ screamed the Evening Standard. ‘Does Labour’s Walden win signal “Portillo moment” for Kemi Badenoch?’ demanded the Bishop’s Stortford Independent. ‘“Portillo moments” to be prominent feature of election night, says Michael Portillo’ sniggered Politics.co.uk.

The shock defeat of the erstwhile defence secretary and no-longer Conservative leadership candidate Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo by Stephen Twigg at Enfield Southgate in 1997 has entered the public lexicon to the extent that it merits its own Wikipedia page, no less.

So, what will be the Portillo moment on the night of 4 July 2024? Well, there won’t be one, as the man himself observed on GB News: ‘There can be no Portillo moment because even [Rishi Sunak’s] defeat would be no surprise.’

And that is the point. What made Portillo’s defenestration so memorable was not just the size of the beast that was toppled, but that no one saw it coming, even after the exit poll confirmed a likely Labour landslide. When Jeremy Paxman asked Portillo: ‘Are you going to miss the ministerial limo?’ early in the night, he went on to point out: ‘It is likely you will be one of the few cabinet ministers that keeps his seat.’

Even if a previously unassailable minister is assailed this time, that electoral assault will have been long trailed. And even if there is a surprise loss for a senior Labour figure, or even a Nigel Farage, these are not the people who have ruled without interruption for more than a decade, giving them the same aura of permanence that was shattered for Portillo and chums in 1997.

No ‘Portillo moment’, then. Guess we are about wrapped up – and much quicker than usual too.

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Of course I kid, because the phenomenon does bring out something if not quite unique to the British system, then something peculiar to it: that a leading national figure can find themselves abruptly removed by a local electorate. In more proportional methods of election, party lists and multi-member voting areas, prominent individuals are usually protected from such removal, while elsewhere executives are not drawn from the legislature in the first place. (Whatever happens in the forthcoming French snap parliamentary election, there will not be un moment de Portillo.)

Overmore – and this really is an unusual feature of the British system – rather than watching from friendly headquarters as returns are announced bit-by-bit, even the most distinguished Commons candidate must attend the local town hall or leisure centre to await their result, before gathering with opponents, and sometimes attention-seeking independents, for the declaration of what, just occasionally, is their shattering defeat. It’s a set piece that television ought to have had to invent, if it hadn’t been handed to the cameras by a quirk of precedent.

Portillo himself met that moment with dignity, later explaining: ‘My resolve to behave properly was stiffened when I saw the ousted David Mellor brawling with Jimmy Goldsmith in Putney, an hour or two before my result was announced.’ Still, outside of the UK, there is little chance Portillo or Mellor would have had to share the moment with those rejoicing at their ejection.

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Prior to 1926, MPs who were appointed to the cabinet had to resign and seek immediate re-election in their constituency, something that temporarily did for new president of the Board of Trade Winston Churchill in 1908. Since then, they have been safe until the next general election – but only till then.

In 1935 Ramsay MacDonald, not long retired as prime minister and now Lord President of the Council, lost Seaham to Manny Shinwell (who held the seat and its successor Easington for the next 35 years) on a large swing, but the National Labour leader was already in fading health, and in any case soon found a way back. Still, a man who only months before had been PM was denied the title MP by local voters – something not risked by his successor-but-eighteen last year, of course.

The only mass ousting of cabinet ministers in a single election other than 1997 was in 1945, when six of Winston Churchill’s caretaker ministry lost their seat, including his close allies Leo Amery and Brendan Bracken, plus Harold Macmillan, who, unlike Portillo, remained a future leader. (He, Bracken and outgoing education minister Richard Law returned in by-elections within months, even quicker than Portillo managed.)

Obviously, the significance of the 1945 election is not so much what the electorate did to individual ministers, but to the collective spectacle of the government (and Churchill personally). This was the last general election to go untelevised, not that live pictures were needed to underline the drama of that day – however much people of later times might have been ‘up for Bracken‘.

When Labour next ousted the Tories in 1964, two Cabinet ministers were defeated, but the declaration that provided perhaps the first Portillo-moment result of the televised era was the defeat of an Opposition spokesman: foreign secretary-designate Patrick Gordon Walker at Smethwick.

The result was against the national tide but far from unanticipated, as the race-tinged local campaign had already attracted national notoriety. The announcement of the result by a tetchy Alderman Clarence Williams remains a stand-out moment of drama even in the maelstrom of election night. ‘This is the most fateful single result of this election,’ BBC political editor Ian Trethowan immediately pronounces. ‘The one Conservative gain … they would have preferred not to get.’ Gordon Walker is subsequently interviewed with sympathy, and victor Peter Griffiths disdained, in stark contrast to Portillo and Twigg thirty-three years later.

However, the electorate were not done with Gordon Walker. He was defiantly appointed foreign secretary, and a safe vacancy was swiftly created for him at Leyton when long-standing MP Reginald Sorensen was elevated (reluctantly) to the Lords, triggering a by-election. Except that, unlike Macmillan, Bracken and Law in 1945, Gordon Walker found his ambitions thwarted a second time by an even bigger swing than at Smethwick.

This time it was not apparently weaponised racial prejudice but more local discontent at the engineering of the by-election that caused Walker’s fresh, and probably more shocking, defeat. Regardless, the voters of a seat which had not before (in its then form) and not since (in any form) failed to return a Labour candidate showed their teeth, forcing Harold Wilson to find a new foreign secretary and providing a severe jolt to the high-flying career of Gordon Walker, though he did have a couple of years at lower rungs of the cabinet after eventually winning Leyton in 1966.

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Education secretary Shirley Williams losing Hertford and Stevenage in 1979 was not quite as seismic, though on the standard national swing she would have survived. The BBC coverage portrays it as almost an anti-Portillo moment, a result no one outside a certain bit of the Hertfordshire commuter belt wanted to see.

‘She is a marvellous person, one of the most honest and sincere people in politics … I hope she’ll soon be back,’ is Norman St John-Stevas’s immediate reaction. Interviewing her later, Robin Day remarks, with the interrogative ferocity that set even the hardest politician a-tremble: ‘It’s rather puzzling – if I may say so you are a most attractive campaigner as well as being an attractive lady … one would have thought you would have relatively little difficulty.’ Tony Benn records bitterly in his diary: ‘The media treated it as if it were a state funeral.’

It was perhaps a more significant moment, though, than it seemed at the time, since of course by the time Williams returned to the Commons she was in the SDP. Whether she might have ended up leading the Labour party and changing the course of 1980s politics, had she remained an MP in 1979, we cannot know – and the odds seem against it – but again a local electorate was able to effect, maybe even profoundly, the course of national politics.

Or even those of another nation, in the case of Bath in 1992, when they preferred Liberal Democrat Don Foster to Conservative chairman Chris Patten. Also treated sympathetically in the TV coverage, Patten had been forced to concentrate on the national campaign rather than nursing his own marginal seat. John Major soon gave Patten the consolation of being (the last) Governor of Hong Kong, a tenure not short on incident, and the start of a multi-purpose public-service career that took in spells as a European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. It is possible Patten might have risen to even greater heights had he remained within domestic politics but the voters of Bath had other ideas.

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And so to 1997 when Portillo was pushed through the door marked ‘do one’ along with cabinet colleagues Michael Forsyth, Roger Freeman, Ian Lang, Tony Newton, Malcolm Rifkind and William Waldegrave, not to mention Mellor, Neil Hamilton, Jonathan Aitken and – as the old compilation LP adverts used to say – many, many more.

Since the formalisation of the Portillo moment, there has been no near equivalent. There was Ed Balls clinging on in Morley and Outwood in 2010 (if not five years later) and the defeat of Lib Dems Danny Alexander, Vince Cable and Ed Davey in 2015, along with pretty much the whole Scottish Labour contingent. Well-known names in many cases but lacking the immediate proximity to power or renown of Portillo or his antecedents.

Nevertheless, the fact that prime ministers and secretaries of state, incumbent or designate, can suffer such an indignity, and that a locality previously obscure outside its regional environs might, through the action of a few thousand electors, bring towering political careers crashing down is most certainly encapsulated by Michael Portillo’s televised grimace on the night of 1 May 1997. Whether this is a usual discipline for the powerful, or a double-edged way of depriving a government or the Commons of the best national talent, it is – short of major electoral reform – a reality.

The question of whether the British electoral system, and political constitution more generally, is an outdated relic or elegant accident of history will probably not be settled in the coming weeks or years. But losing this one particular feature could have the result that – to paraphrase Tony Benn himself some years before being booted out at Bristol East – those in the highest of offices might be a bit less likely to ‘tremble before’ the British people.

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