What is Starmer’s big new idea? It’s not to be found in his anodyne one-word slogan, “Change”. None of his signature policies – renationalising industry, creating new state-owned enterprises, punitive taxation of the middle class – are modern. They are the same old recooked socialist ideas from the days of Wilson, which Blair repudiated. Starmer’s future looks very much like the 1970s.

The other winners were the Liberal Democrats who, with 72 seats, achieved their best result in their current form– a result not seen by the Liberal Party since the collapse of Lloyd George’s government more than a century ago.

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Apart from Starmer, the biggest personal winner was Nigel Farage. While his Reform Party won only five seats, the true measure of his impact is to be seen in the huge number of seats he cost the Tories. Polling suggests that one in four people who voted Conservative in 2019 intended to vote for Farage this time. The debate about whether to join with Farage or repudiate him will dominate Conservative politics in coming years.

In sheer seat numbers, the biggest loser was the Scottish National Party, swept away in all but nine of its 48 seats by Labour. With that, the Scottish independence movement will subside.

The other big loser was, of course, the Conservative Party. This was its worst defeat in its two-century history: the loss of 251 seats exceeded its previous greatest electoral cataclysm, when the Balfour government went out of office in 1906, losing 246 seats.

Commentators and political scientists will spend years analysing how the Tories’ biggest victory since Thatcher turned into its worst electoral humiliation in just one parliamentary term. In my view, the turning point was the political assassination of Boris Johnson two years ago today. Everything went downhill after that. It was a spectacular act of political self-harm.

Those who say that things were already going downhill – that Johnson had become toxically unpopular due to the “partygate” scandal – miss the point. Johnson’s Houdini-like capacity to recover from seemingly unsurvivable political scrapes has defined his career. As the news cycle moved on, he would have recovered from “partygate”. A mesmerising stump orator with remarkable appeal to working-class Britons, he would have given the charmless Starmer a run for his money. I doubt he would have won – the “It’s time” factor for any long-serving government is as irreversible as the ebbing of the tide – but I have no doubt that he would have done much better than Sunak.

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At the very least, Johnson would have kept Farage out of the race. Farage (who was initially reluctant to run at all) has always been intimidated by Johnson, whose appeal to Brexiteers eclipses his. Dozens of safe seats lost to Labour or the Liberal Democrats would have been saved had Farage not skimmed a quarter of the Tory vote.

As a triumphant Starmer embarked on his new job last Friday, many of the skittish, spineless Tories who lost their nerve in 2022 woke up without theirs. They have only themselves to blame.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at ANU.

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