NO prime minister has entered Downing Street with a more compromised mandate, with scarcely a breeze to lift his sails.

The joy at the end of Tory rule, symbolised by the loss of the constituencies once represented by David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, cannot disguise the less than ringing endorsement of Keir Starmer’s Labour.

Nor can the iniquities of the first-past-the-post system, which gifted Labour a Commons landslide over a divided right, mask the fact that Starmer takes office with his electoral coalition already crumbling.

At the start of the election, it was a fair bet that Starmer’s Labour would not win more votes than Corbyn’s Labour, lifted by a tide of actual enthusiasm, did in 2017.

Not only did Labour fail to clear that hurdle on Thursday, it almost incredibly fell below the total vote secured by Labour in the grim 2019 result, and its vote share rose by just an anaemic 1.6 per cent.

Only in Scotland has the party’s share of the vote increased. Across England and Wales it has barely progressed and in many places slumped. This was not Tony Blair in 1997 by any stretch.

So Starmer’s four-year war on the left now looks like a failure even in the terms by which its progenitors would insist that it be judged — winning votes. His Labour has less support than Corbyn’s.

The first thing to say about this outcome, so much less emphatic in terms of votes than all the polls predicted, is that it should not have been surprising.

Despite proclaiming “change” as the party’s slogan, the only real change Starmer had in mind was a change in the occupant of Downing Street.

The policies which would have made a real difference — the ones he championed when running to be Labour leader — have one by one been discarded under Treasury and right-wing pressure.

The result was to leave Labour vulnerable to attack from almost every direction other than the bankrupt Tory Party.

And that is what seems to have occurred. Scotland aside, Labour lost votes promiscuously, even as it picked up seats.

It lost them to Reform. While Nigel Farage’s party mainly cannibalised the Tory vote in this election, it has also emerged as the main alternative to Labour in a range of post-industrial constituencies.

Experience from other European countries suggests that this is a problem which will only get worse if the underlying social crises are not addressed. Farage says he is now gunning for Labour and it would be as well to take him seriously.

Starmer asserts that progressives can meet that challenge, but he has yet to suggest any initiatives which would translate that intent into action.

Then Labour has lost votes across the country to the Greens, who were more or less squeezed to the margins in the Corbyn years but now have ample space to present themselves as the heir to the radicalism Labour offered then.

The Greens targeted four seats this time and won them all. They will surely be challengers in many more at the next opportunity. The doubling of their vote owes much to their own efforts, of course, but perhaps as much to Starmer’s determination to eliminate the slightest trace of social, economic or climate radicalism from Labour’s pitch.

Finally, Labour’s crisis in the Muslim communities was underscored beyond expectations. Four seats tumbled to independent candidates standing up for Gaza above all, and many more were on a knife edge.

These are the fruits of Starmer’s unblinking Atlanticism, his subservience to Washington, which is the real explanation for his endorsement of Israel’s genocidal aggression.

But the crisis caused by the Gaza war followed years of indulgence of Islamophobia and preceded Starmer’s dog-whistle attempts to drive Diane Abbott from Parliament and his shameful remarks about deporting Bangladeshis.

He has thus managed to offend black people and anti-racists without making any compensating gains among white voters attracted to Reform, presumably the object of his manoeuvres.

How the newly elected independents organise themselves in Parliament, how they relate to other political forces inside and outside the Commons, including the Greens, and how they expand their political base, are all novel and important questions for the wider left.

If this disintegration within a victory has a symbol, it must be the triumphant re-election of Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North.

The man who Starmer has made his nemesis through his own choices will now be sitting in Parliament pushing, as ever, for peace and social justice. With the support of an enormous nationwide mobilisation of the left, Corbyn’s margin of victory was ample.

The former Labour leader thus has his own mandate, speaking for the views of millions in the Commons. He can be relied upon to use it.

How Starmer himself must wish for a comparable degree of constituency support — his own has halved since 2019, partly as a result of a spirited campaign by independent socialist Andrew Feinstein.

Basically, Starmer was far more popular when he stood under Jeremy Corbyn’s banner than under his own.

If there is a precedent for a prime minister taking office while losing half his personal vote it is not easy to find. And it is certain that no party has done so with less than 34 per cent support, and that on a turnout of just 60 per cent, the second lowest since the 19th century.

There is another symbol of the ineptitude of the Starmer apparatus, too, and a less edifying one. It is the return to Parliament of Iain Duncan Smith, the Sinophobic Tory ex-leader, who must have believed his parliamentary career was finally dead and buried when Rishi Sunak called the election.

That he is still in the Commons is the handiwork of obtuse factionalists Luke Akehurst and Morgan McSweeney, who prioritised eliminating a left MP of enormous potential, axing Faiza Shaheen and replacing her with an unwanted Starmeroid imposed from outside.

The result: Duncan Smith lives again politically. The lesson: racist factionalism doesn’t work.

If Labour’s majority is both nebulous and fragile, the position of the Tories is catastrophic. Never has the natural governing party of the British bourgeoisie been laid so low, in terms both of Commons seats and share of the popular vote.

They have not, however, been eliminated, and preserve a base from which they might bounce back in time, if they can only decide which is the road to recovery. Having Nigel Farage breathing down your neck in Parliament is hardly conducive to the calm debate the Conservative Party needs.

But politics is now more fragmented than ever. Combined the two parties which have governed for the last century between them today speak for a little over half the electorate. This is a recalibration of class politics that confounds time-worn formulations and strategies.

Still, with all of this, Starmer can probably live with such problems for now. Being in government, after all, does give you levers to address your challenges if you choose to pull them.

He could unite his fissiparous coalition and build on it. But it will require the new Prime Minister to at least privately swallow a bit of pride and learn from his predecessor.

In an admittedly back-handed and partial way, Thursday’s result was a vindication of Corbynism as well as Corbyn himself. Should, as I would expect, the new government led by the former state prosecutor be unwilling to face that reality — well, it will have to be made to.

For Labour to carry on as proposed is the road to Farage, Suella Braverman and perhaps still worse. Mass pressure for real change has never felt more critical.