Brexit without a happy ending for the Tories

The UK would be paradise again, with an enviable welfare state and, in terms of trade, London would monopolise the big contracts with the world's most developed countries, starting by increasing the spatial relationship with America's cousins, without the need for Brussels' intermediation. 

One after another, four Conservative prime ministers in five years painted Britons a dream scenario, once unshackled from the shackles of heavy and tedious Brussels bureaucracy. The package also included the revival of public services, especially the much-loved National Health Service (NHS), the rightly-deserved pride of the British people. 

And what was bound to happen happened. Voters, especially those with a lot of history and democratic experience behind them, saw day by day that nothing was as it was painted from 10 Downing Street, some with the vehemence of the charismatic - so said his fiercest supporters - Boris Johnson; others with the lack of conviction of Liz Truss "The Brief", and the last in line, Rishi Sunak, discovering his impotence despite his good handling of numbers and finances. 

So Sir Keir Starmer had only to maintain his dull and even dreary demeanour, keep his tongue in his mouth and therefore keep his foot in his mouth, to win a landslide victory, the second biggest in Labour's history since Tony Blair. And, as in the United Kingdom they take the saying "dead king, new king" literally, Shunak has already left the official residence of the head of government so that the cleaning and refurbishment service could leave everything clear and in order for Starmer to take possession of his new home. 

The man who, after being promoted by the previous radicalised Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, ended up pushing Corbyn out of the party, successfully undertook the task of stripping him of extremism and re-centring him. Broadly speaking, this is his background and the merits that a priori the voters have valued and which have given him such a resounding victory. His detractors say that he lacks charisma, even in his own party. He is sure to get that attribute in a few days. With such an absolute majority, there is no doubt that charisma will soon be on his head. 

With the Conservative Party's woeful cycle of almost three decades in a row over, Starmer has a huge task ahead of him. He has been careful not to get his fingers burnt, so that he has denied those who predicted a new referendum to return to the European club, but, if his first term in office does not seem to undo Brexit, relations with the EU will certainly improve in the interests of both, having empirically verified the weakening of one and the other after the separation. 

London and Brussels will need to increase cooperation on the very tricky problem of illegal immigration, and at least maintain levels of mutual assistance and inter-relationship on security and defence issues. Domestically, of course, swift and imaginative measures will need to be put in place immediately to restore public services, a task made all the more difficult by the fact that finances are not in the best of shape.