Will the Tories finally get the message?

Can it just be a coincidence that most of the leading figures of the Tory left lost their seats, while the coming women and men of the right largely held on? Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman all made it back to the Commons while whole phalanxes of would-be leadership contenders from the ‘One Nation’ wing of the party fell by the wayside. Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Alex Chalk and Gillian Keegan were among the biggest casualties.

Perhaps having anti-woke and mass-migration sceptic credentials helped those on the right minimise the Reform vote in their patches and thus avoid a bloodbath that Nigel Farage had far more to do with than Keir Starmer did.

For it was Farage’s dynamic revolt on the right, rather than Starmer’s underwhelming Labour trickle forward, in terms of vote share, that changed the electoral