This narrow demographic helped the PM into No 10. But overemphasis on socially conservative voters will lead to failure

With every difficult day Keir Starmer’s government has to navigate, the ease of its election victory only two months ago feels more and more extraordinary. Despite winning only a mediocre 33.7% of the vote, Labour gained 211 seats, the most by any party since 1945, and reduced the Tories to a rump barely half that number. These achievements will be mythologised and analysed by Labour members and strategists for decades to come.

Probably the most startling success of all was in the “red wall”. According to the research firm Focaldata, whose analyst James Kanagasooriam first identified this supposedly pivotal electoral zone in 2019, Labour won 37 of its 38 seats. The party had lost a majority of these former strongholds to the Tories during the 2010s, a loss widely seen at the time as hugely damaging and possibly permanent, but on 4 July 2024 that trend was spectacularly reversed. Starmer’s decision to shape his leadership largely around winning back patriotic, often socially conservative red-wall voters who want tight controls on state spending and immigration – an approach you could call red-wall Labourism – seemed to have been completely vindicated.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist