Does Keir Starmer’s landslide give Labour two terms? You bet…

This election is one for the history books. It is the greatest fall for the Conservative Party in its history – and could be permanent. The Tories will now be left out in the cold.

Boris Johnson’s “realignment of British politics” turned out to be a temporary and ramshackle thing.

In his deluded admirers’ grander moments, they thought he had moulded a new coalition of working-class Leave voters and traditional middle-class Conservatives that would dominate politics for at least a decade.

After just two years, though, such dreams turned into the morning after the Downing Street parties – and the Tory party tore itself apart.

So, what’s different about Keir Starmer?

There are reasons for thinking that Labour’s majority will be more durable. Not because it is bigger, although it will be twice as big as Johnson’s majority, because that is the artificial product of our voting system. The Labour share of the vote yesterday was 35 or 36 per cent, which is rather lower than Boris Johnson’s 45 per cent.

But the reason such a modest share of the vote produced such a vast representation in the House of Commons is that the right was split. Actually, the Labour vote did not go up very much, but the Tory vote fell by a large amount as former supporters switched to Reform or stayed at home.

And that split on the right is likely to last. At the 2019 election, Johnson won because voters were fed up with the Brexit deadlock and they had gone off Jeremy Corbyn in a big way. Within weeks of the 2019 election, neither of those applied any more. The “realignment” was already over, long before the living standards crisis, Partygate and Liz Truss.

Starmer has now won because he offers a reasonable and competent alternative. But it will be difficult. His large majority will be filled not only with loyalists, but with those who want to pull the party in a Corbynite direction. He will struggle to keep the party in the centre.

That means, as I have written before, that Labour will have to provide its own opposition, and it will have a large number of MPs available to be tempted to do so. This will be difficult, but it would be absurd to suggest that a landslide election win is a disaster for Starmer.

The electoral division on the right cannot be healed overnight. It is not even similar to the split on the left that helped keep Labour out of power in the 1980s. Then, the left was divided between Labour and the centrist Social Democratic Party. The solution was simple: for Labour to move to the centre, which it did – eventually.

What will dominate parliament now is the divide between the Tories and Reform, on the right. If the Tories try to heal the rift by moving further to the right, they will put off people who voted Labour or Lib Dem this time round, who the Tories need to win back. For now, they have seen some comfort in gaining more seats than anticipated – they had feared annihilation.

If the new Tory leader – probably Kemi Badenoch, now that she has held her seat – tries to move towards Labour and the Lib Dems, though, Nigel Farage will continue to squat on all that space to her right, stealing her votes. PMQs will become gladiatorial and dramatic, “must-watch” viewing as Farage and his silver tongue tests the other parties for attention.

It won’t be easy to marginalise him and it certainly won’t be quick. The Tory government’s “betrayal” as they see it of its promises on immigration and tax cannot be lived down that easily. Especially if the Labour government keeps net immigration much lower than Johnson’s Brexit government did, and if Rachel Reeves avoids raising taxes by too much.

Yes, the Labour government will face challenges, and it might become unpopular quite quickly. But with a cushion of a double-Johnson majority and the opposition vote irreparably split, the sandcastle may survive the waves for two parliamentary terms. Hold on to your seats.