There’s been a lot of talk by Conservative politicians and commentators since the election results came in yesterday about the supposed “shallowness” of Labour’s victory.
Chief among those taking a hearty drag of the copium is the disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who writes in his Daily Mail column today that Starmer’s victory was “a mile wide and an inch deep”.
But is it really?
While it’s true that Labour’s final vote share was lower than pollsters predicted, the results suggest there was a huge amount of tactical voting, with voters picking whichever party was best placed to remove the Conservatives in their own part of the country.
Because if Labour’s support can be described as shallow, then opposition to the Conservative party can definitely be described as deep.
And if Johnson and his party really believe that this opposition will somehow simply drain away over the next five years in the face of a Labour government then they are set to be massively disappointed.
Because the truth is that while you will struggle to find many people massively enthusiastic about a Starmer government, what you will find is lots of people who are hopeful about it.
I’m writing this from the Byline Festival in Devon and while there are lots of people here who could be best described as Starmersceptic, it would be hard to find anyone who is not hopeful that things will improve under a Labour government.
And the truth is that there are good reasons to be hopeful.
Here are five of them.