LONDON — Earlier this year in the Spectator magazine, I wrote that this is the first “post-hope” election the notoriously hopeful British people have seen; sour times for this happy breed, once so cheery and resilient, now as overcast as the weather we always took in our stride. The adults are back in the room, and they’ve told us to wipe those silly smiles off our faces, forget about blowing those Brexit-shaped kazoos, and prepare for an era when it’s always winter and never Christmas.

Three hours after the ballots closed, at 1 a.m. on July 4, one of the first BBC pit-stops of the election counts was the Titanic Centre in Northern Ireland, a forewarning the Conservatives — the most successful political party in the history of the British isles, now experiencing their greatest defeat ever — must surely have winced at. In 2022 Boris Johnson dubbed Sir Keir “Captain Crasher-Roony Snooze-Fest” but after the unseating of Boris by the ‘grown up’ faction of Sunak, Starmer has romped to power. 

By 2 o’clock, he and his astonishingly attractive wife, Victoria, were making their triumphant passage to his constituency HQ to hug and greet a pleasingly multi-hued campaign team. One would have to have a heart of stone not to have suppressed a sniffle when the Jewish Mrs. Starmer embraced a hijab’d party worker; if that doesn’t make you want to buy the world a Coke, nothing will.

Boris famously attracted the Labour-voting working-class (including myself, raised in a Communist household and still a keen fan of abolishing the monarchy, banning private schools, and nationalizing everything) with his maverick support for Brexit, and his acknowledgment of this was the best part of his 2019 victory speech:

“To all those who voted for us yesterday, especially those who voted for us for the first time…you may only have lent us your vote, you may not see yourself as a natural Tory…your hand may have quivered over the ballot paper before you put your cross in the Conservative box…and you may think you will return to Labour next time around. And if that is the case, I am humbled that you have put your trust in me, that you have put your trust in us, and I and we will never take your support for granted.”

The Tories, though, did take that support for granted by booting out Boris and bungling Brexit. They’re now paying for that by losing a vast amount of the “Red Wall” vote they loaned to the Reform Party — formerly the Brexit Party — which has decimated the Tory vote and beat them into third place in many working-class constituencies. Suella Braverman, a rare robust rebel among the soft-soap shape-shifters of the Sunak takeover,  put it well in her winning speech, echoing Mr. Johnson in happier times for the Tories: “We acted as if we were entitled to your vote, despite not promising to do what we said we would do.”

Keir Starmer made his acceptance speech at 5 this morning; even then, in the heat of victory, the poem “Antigonish” by Hughes Mearns came to mind:

“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…”

This passionate android who has schemed and dreamed his way to the top of the Labour Party — and who, to give him his due, has turned it around from the unelectable anti-Semitic quagmire it was a mere five years ago — came as near as he will to his visionary moment: “Now we can look forward, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again, on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.” You could feel the audience straining, and the old line from The X Files came to mind: I Want To Believe.

Oscar Wilde said that there are two tragedies in life: getting what you want — and not getting it. Sadly for Sir Keir, there’s no money left and by the New Year, he may well be left with a gift that he doesn’t really know what to do with — and no returns. Oddly, there has been no summer here yet in Britain, though Midsummer’s Day was a fortnight ago, still, we can but hope, though I can already see Starmer’s face telling us that we mustn’t be silly, we don’t actually need a summer, and anyway it’s time to put away childish things. But we are a disloyal people now, broken free from our tribal bonds for good or ill, who lose patience swiftly and mercilessly. Sir Keir should make the best of his day in the sun, because in post-hope Britain, the permafrost is always there.