Labour will rue the seats lost to independents and Greens, and the failure to respond to anger over its stance on Gaza

If the Starmer project has a guiding philosophy, it goes like this: Labour must define itself against the left. If a speech or policy offends the left, then good. If a candidate on the party’s left makes it through, they should be marginalised or purged. Within the electorate, leftwing voters are seen as irrelevant, because they’ll vote Labour no matter what to keep the Tories out, with those votes stacking up in safe urban seats.

Starmer’s cheerleaders may well conclude that this strategy still holds. After all, Labour has secured a landslide victory, and the Tories have suffered their most shattering defeat since they were founded in their modern form 190 years ago. Indeed, in our democratic history, no electoral rout has been more deserved. The evidence was everywhere, from an unparalleled squeeze in living standards to Liz Truss’s deranged attempt to turn Britain into a laboratory for hard-right economics; from a collapsing NHS to the repeated clobbering of the young.

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On Canvey Island in Essex, I found hard-up, demoralised voters taking refuge in rightwing half-truths

If politics is a soap opera, the people of Canvey Island switched off a few years ago. This is England at its most Conservative, literally: the island is in the constituency of Castle Point, which delivered the highest vote share (76.7%) in Britain for the party at the 2019 election.

The Tories’ looming appointment with electoral calamity is evident from the responses I receive when visiting this Essex coastal town, which range from indifference to contempt. There are plenty of older folk (a quarter of the residents in the constituency are aged over 65) but also a sprinkling of families, as well as shirtless young lads bombing down the high street on bikes, passing union flag bunting on the railings. Ask about the election, and some respond as if it’s the first they’ve heard of it, others like it’s a mild trauma they’d rather forget.