This is the weirdest ‘triumph’ ever. The voters hate everyone

Say what you like about First Past the Post, but no other system produces this sort of chaos. Has there ever, in the history of British politics, been a weirder triumph than this one?

Labour is on track for an historic majority, the Conservatives for their worst-ever performance. It ought to be the start of a new era; Rachel Reeves is certainly trying to spin up the idea that the UK will look like a haven of stability against what’s playing out in Europe.

That prospectus was always sketchy: healthy, happy democracies do not bestow historic landslides on relatively unpopular oppositions with paper-thin programmes for change. Yet the results so far have shredded it: two shadow cabinet ministers out in Bristol and Leicester, Wes Streeting barely holding on, and a shock Tory gain in Leicester East.

None of that changes the basics, of course: it is an historic win for Labour, and an historic rout for the Conservatives. But it does contextualise it – glad confident morning, this is not.

Turnout is another tile in this mosaic of disillusion; at the time of writing, it is hovering around 61 per cent, the lowest since 2015 and a full ten points down on 1997, the last time a Labour prime minister was swept into office with a majority on anything like this scale.

If the public is disaffected, it’s hard to blame them. For all the fury the two parties have aimed at each other over the past six weeks, on economic policy Labour and the Conservatives are not that far apart: hazy promises on housing, infrastructure, and taxation, papered over by furious rows over relatively trivial policies such as VAT on private schools.

The danger for Labour is that they now follow in the footsteps of Boris Johnson. He too secured a landslide by stitching together an unwieldy coalition with vague promises; within one term, what looked like an historic redrawing of the British electoral map has been lost to time, like tears in rain.

Starmer’s majority is bigger, and the Opposition he’ll face much weaker. But he faces a similar dilemma: trying to raise living standards, bring infrastructure under control, and deliver affordable housing keeping his progressive MPs and activists happy and staunching a dangerous bleed to more extreme (and in his case, communalist) candidates.

The buffer he secured last night will probably see him through an election in 2028 and 2029. But at some point, the wheels are going to come off, and we may yet see another of the decisive, high-turnout elections that happen when the British people really tune in.

The Lord only knows what will happen then.