Already our politics feels a little bit calmer. Labour has kicked out the Tories, Sir Keir Starmer has moved into Downing Street, and the Cabinet table is surrounded by fresh faces.
There is none of the frothy excitement and frenetic sense of national renewal felt when the last Labour leader ejected a clapped-out bunch of fractious Conservatives. Instead, there is an air of rather downbeat realism, symbolised by acknowledgement that our creaking health and prison services are in crisis and in urgent need of reform, as I have been arguing for many years.
Suddenly there feels something strangely exciting about the concept of dreary competence in government, the idea that a team of ministers might pull together to sort out the country’s many problems rather than focus solely on their own futures with performative stunts. So infectious is this mood – this weird idea that politicians might try to actually deliver on pledges, rather than simply play selfish power games – that it is already being adopted by some of the Tories and leading Brexiteers, who did so much to foster last week’s mass culling of Conservatives.
The collapse of their vote – almost halving under an onslaught of tactical voting that proved so profitable for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats – demonstrated how many sections of the electorate were fed up with the feuding and ineptitude among people elected and paid to run the country.
The challenge for Starmer when normal politics resumes after his honeymoon is to see if his........