Keir Starmer’s champagne should have a bitter edge today. 

Labour have not won the election as much as the Conservatives have lost it. As I write, Labour’s vote share is projected to be around 35 per cent. In 2019, a historic failure for the party, their vote share was only marginally smaller. In 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn came closest to victory, they earned 40 per cent.

“It’s not an enormous landslide of votes,” Corbyn — glowing with good cheer following his own independent success — has quipped, “It’s a landslide of seats.” So it is. The Conservatives have bled voters to Reform and the Liberal Democrats, ensuring that the latter have their best result in modern times — better, it seems, than in 2010, when “Cleggmania” was alleged to be a thing — while the former, who have barely begun to exist, are rivalling the Tories.

Granted, the outcome is still a massive triumph for Starmer. He looks set to have won more than four hundred seats — winning by a margin Donald Trump would struggle to dispute. If a football team wins 4–0 because their opponents are so dire, it is the same result as if they had won because of their sheer skill. 

True, true. But it does not have quite the same implications. Winning because of your strength suggests more heavily that you will win again than winning because of your opponents’ weakness. Politics, like sport, never ends. Each day asks questions about the next. Labour cannot be too optimistic about the coming answers.

The next five years will ask the question, who can implode the most dramatically? Labour will be riven with feuds about economic and foreign policy, with the *ahem* centrist Starmerites at odds with the radicals who still await the second coming of the messiah from Islington North. Starmer, who lost almost half his votes in his own constituency, cannot feel secure. Tony Blair won in the spirit of “things can only get better”. Starmer has won with the vibe of “how much worse can they get?”

The Conservatives, meanwhile, will be split between people who think that they have failed because they were too right-wing and people who think they have failed because they were not right-wing enough. Millions of would-be Tories — as well, I suspect, as a lot of would-be Labour voters — backing a one-man band with a nebulous platform and almost overwhelming media opposition strongly suggests the latter to me — but what do I know? Certainly, their failure has also had a lot to do with their just being rubbish. 

The Conservatives and Reform will have an awkward relationship as well. Their combined vote share appears to exceed that of Labour. Will they cooperate or be at odds? Farage will have his own problems keeping his band of misfit outcasts together. As no one’s idea of a team player, he is ill-suited to the role of building party infrastructure. The Dominic Cummingses of tomorrow have a chance to make a name for themselves in Reform — though Dominic Cummings himself is a wildcard if he pursues his plan for a “credibly anti-insider” startup party.

Yes, prepare yourselves for some depressing years ahead. Starmer will look to improve the economy just enough, and lower legal and illegal immigration just enough, to keep his far left and conservative voters onside. He will seek to quietly advance the tendrils of the Blob throughout British constitutional and institutional life — choking out opportunities for innovation and dissent. 

It can only work politically, in this observer’s opinion, if his opponents are so ineffective as to make Hague, Howard and Duncan Smith look like political giants. But who can count that out?