Gleeful Keir Starmer's honeymoon will be short-lived – Tories can wipe smile off his face

Good God, what an appalling night. To go from an 80-seat majority, just four and a half years ago, to complete humiliation now speaks to a staggering series of unforced Tory mistakes – from lockdown to Partygate, Liz Truss and absurd levels of immigration. Labour didn’t win this election; the Tories lost it. Categorically. No wonder many are now asking if they can ever recover.

But look beneath the bald headlines and there are chunks of comfort. Whisper it, but the Tories could recover a whole lot more quickly than the doomsters imagine. But only if they do politics very, very much better than they have since the autumn of 2021.

First, and most importantly, Starmer has barely increased Labour’s share of the vote from 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn led the party to a car-crash defeat. In England alone, it hasn’t increased at all. Why? Because the public has quite simply seen through the man. They know he’s got no plan. They know he’s flip-flopped on everything you can name. They know he’s just another politician who will say what it takes, whether he means it or not. The biggest reason for voting for him was “to get rid of the Tories”.

That’s no resounding mandate. Starmer is the least popular incoming prime minister in living memory.

The fact that Starmer won two-thirds of seats on barely more than one-third of the vote (and on an embarrassingly low turnout) is purely because the Right split down the middle, with a huge slab of Tory 2019 vote going to Reform. Put simply, Nigel Farage has put Starmer in Downing Street. Well, that’s democracy. No complaints.

But crucially, despite it all, the Tories ended up just 11 points behind Labour. Compare that to the cataclysmic predictions of a 25-point Labour lead, or worse. Even this week, some pollsters were predicting the Tories might be overtaken by the LibDems, with the ludicrous dad-dancing Ed Davey becoming Leader of the opposition. God help us.

Just 11 points. That’s all. If the Tories had even been just slightly better than ghastly at doing politics these last two years, they could have won. And consider this: governments rarely increase their share from one election to the next. Oppositions almost always do. Come 2029, if they play their cards right, the Tories could be back.

But a battle royal is now going to take place on the Right, with Nigel Farage playing a leading role. Who knows how this may play out? Will the two parties, Reform and the Tories, continue to split the vote down the middle? If so, we’ve got Starmer for a decade or more. Will one or other of them dominate? Will they merge? If so, Labour will be in big trouble.

Labour is, of course, gleeful at its massive victory. But its honeymoon will be short. People will quickly see that Starmer has no solutions to the country’s problems. Just look at Wales, where Labour has been in power for years, but has led the country downhill fast, and actually lost seats last night. That’s a taste of what’s to come in the UK as a whole. It’s a bleak future.

So, the opportunity will be there for the centre-right. Dawn comes after the darkest hour. Can they unite? Will they find a leader who can reach out to that broad church? We must hope so. If they do, then Starmer’s “super majority” might come crashing down in just five years’ time.