“Records will be broken tomorrow,” Ben Page of Ipsos MORI wrote yesterday. And followed it up by posting a list of facts: the lowest turnout in a general election, the smallest number of Conservative MPs, the largest Government majority, and so on.

I write with this general election’s results still coming in, and so can’t confirm whether or not Page was right (though there can surely be no doubt that he was). Indeed, on one point he cannot now be wrong: it’s impossible to see how the Conservatives can win more than 156 seats.

As I write, they have 115 — the core event around which the rest of the results arrange themselves, at least in England and Wales.  For the story of yesterday’s poll looks less like one of Labour advance than one of Tory retreat — with Sir Keir Starmer possessing new territory by default.

But there seems to be more to this election than a blue party losing and a red one gaining. It may be that 2024 turns out to be an outlier, and that future elections look more like the Brexit contests of 2017 (especially) and 2019, in which the two main parties dominated.

However, it’s far more likely that this election is part of a pre-2017 continuum in which the Conservative-Labour duopoly, which ran more or less from 1945 until 2010, is continuing to break up, albeit at greater speed and into smaller pieces. Currently the two “main” parties are predicted to have between them something around a 56 per cent share of the vote.

We have come a very long way since the first crack in the surface appeared in 1962 — in the form of the famous Orpington by-election. The Liberals were the first beneficiaries, winning six million votes in 1974. The SDP failed, ten or so years later, to break the mould.

But since 2010, we’ve had Liberal Democrats in government, UKIP, the Brexit Party, Reform, a few Greens, Change UK — and now visible signs at a parliamentary level of sectarian identitarian religious politics, with Indian-origin Hindus voting Conservative and Pakistan-origin Muslims voting Labour.

Not forgetting the eruption into Welsh and Scottish politicians of nationalism, now a feature of electoral life in both for the best part of half a century. Mention of the mix of politics and religion also brings us back to another venue for it: Northern Ireland.

This fissuring and fragmentation may explain the restraint, for those of us who remember Labour’s landslide in 1997, with which Sir Keir Starmer’s party, or at least the part of it associated with the leadership, has greeted the results so far.

Labour faces the possibility of Reform establishing itself as a populist rival in the north and the Conservatives recovering in the south and midlands — while George Galloway, independents and the Greens eat away at its educated liberal vote in urban areas.

The Conservatives’ terrible result could become terminal — if their faction fighting spirals further downwards, their base in English local government crumbles, and the Liberal Democrats and Reform roll them up at both ends, with the Greens pitching up for good measure.

The Liberal Democrats are pointlessly effective. Effective, because they have rehoned the Tory-slaying talent that they crafted pre-Coalition. Pointless because, as that Coalition taught them, to accept responsibility is to embrace decline.

They can’t replace Labour as a party of the left nor psyche themselves up to become a party of the right — so displacing the troubled Tories. Reform now faces the same strategic problem. Can Farage make a new long march through local government and keep his party together in Parliament?

So much for the ups and downs: Conservatives down and Labour therefore up; but Sir Keir failing to convince, and so leaving openings for the Greens, Galloway, Reform and independents — not to mention the Liberal Democrat old timers.

From one angle, Labour’s determination to build breadth at the expense of depth; its painting-by-numbers approach to policy and presentation, and its focus-grouped caution are the ultimate expression of no-risk professionalism — a formidable achievement.

From another, its terror of the gotcha question, the unscripted answer, the unclosed-down story and the social media meme has turned risk aversion into paralysis — and has proved utterly inadequate, like its Conservative equivalent, for the times we live in.

This election has been haunted by the pervasive sense that our politicians aren’t rising to the challenges: demographic decline, an ageing society, mass migration, culture change.  And that perhaps they aren’t because we aren’t, either.

Admittedly, the last attempt ended badly — Nick Timothy’s sweeping Tory manifesto of 2017, with its leap into a radical social care policy. Maybe voters weren’t up for it being sprung on them at short notice. This would be the optimistic take.

Either that’s right, and bolder leadership can reap richer rewards — both metaphorically and literally. Or it’s wrong, and our future is one of falling living standards, sectarian politics and even nastier politics. Or else we muddle along somewhere between the two.

At any rate, it’s goodbye to Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps and Alex Chalk. And to Jonathan Ashworth and very nearly to Wes Streeting. And in senses other than the electoral one to Rishi Sunak. It’s hello to Nigel Farage and a mass of new Labour MPs and to Timothy himself.

And to the brave new world of identitarian voting in Harrow and Leicester and Dewsbury and Blackburn and Birmingham.  To new monitoring of Islamophobia. And to a mass of new Liberal Democrat MPs. And Richard Tice. And Paul Waugh. And to a new Prime Minister.

How enduring Boris Johnson’s new era seemed to be only five years ago. “The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown,” wrote Burke. “He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty.”

For a moment, our politicians bask in the tide of public endorsement. It catches them and lifts them up. Then suddenly they are plunged downwards. The waves close over them. It’s as though they had never been here at all. Truss. Ashworth. Gone.