Chief Minister Alfred Cannan said he was looking forward to building ‘strong working relationships’ with the new Westminster government.
But behind those official pronouncements, Keir Starmer’s victory is likely to be greeted with a little trepidation.
Part of that is about the major changes that the election have swept in.
It means bidding farewell to relationships with key decision-makers in Westminster and Whitehall departments built up over many years and beginning the task of building up the vital relationships with the new guard.
But part of that nervousness of what a Starmer government will mean comes from bitter experience of the last time Labour was in power.
During that period, the relationship between the Isle of Man and the adjacent isle soured, particularly after Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister in 2007.
It hit rock bottom in November 2008 when the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the late Alistair Darling, told a Treasury select committee that the UK government should review its ties to island as an offshore ‘tax haven’.
He told MPs: ‘We need to have a long hard look at the relationship between this country and a tax haven sitting in the Irish sea.’
It was a comment that sent alarm bells ringing on Bucks Road.
Ministers were quick to point out that we weren’t a tax haven but an international finance centre that prided itself on sound regulation, of being a major contributor via the City of London to the UK economy, and playing its part in the international fight against money laundering, terrorism and tax evasion.
There were comments too about how the closure of the island’s Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander bank - one of the high profile victims of the credit crunch - had been as a direct result of actions taken by the UK government. The first raid on the island’s VAT revenues also came under Labour’s watch, in 2009, although the second bombshell followed in 2011 when David Cameron was Conservative Prime Minister.
Chief Minister Tony Brown announced in Tynwald on October 20, 2009 that the government faced a total reduction of some £90m in relation to our revenue income from the revenue sharing arrangement, rising to £140m in subsequent years which he said would have ‘serious implications for the island’.
‘This situation is clearly extremely serious for us and unprecedented in our recent history,’ he told the court.
The VAT bombshell saw terminology more akin to wartime used in Tynwald, with MHKs claiming we were ‘under attack’.
Then Douglas North MHK Bill Henderson, now an MLC and member for Treasury, described it as the ‘actions of a robber-baron state’.
Another issue that soured relations was the announcement by the UK government in 2009 that it would scrap the reciprocal health agreement. The then Health Minister Eddie Teare said there was little chance that Westminster would change its mind.
But in the event the agreement was reinstated thanks to a hard-fought campaign mounted here and crucially the support of Andy Burnham, now Manchester Mayor, following his appointment as Health Secretary. It was a classic example of the need to have friends in high places.
After Jeremy Corbyn won election to the Labour leadership, there was a slim prospect of a radical left government being voted in across. Corbyn was an unlikely ally to the Isle of Man having accused us of links to tax avoidance.
But Howard Quayle as chief minister did his best to win him over. Attending the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in 2018 he spoke to the firebrand Labour leader pointing out our electricity and water supplies are state-owned and the Manx government had just nationalised the ferry company.
In the event, he needn’t have worried. Labour was wiped out in the 2019 general election by Boris Johnson’s Blue Wall and the party seemed consigned to the political wilderness only for it to become electable again under Keir Starmer.
Commenters believe his landslide victory will usher in a period of bland and boring politics. For the Isle of Man’s sake, we can only hope that will indeed be the case.