So now we know — the Tories are even more widely loathed than they dared imagine

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A historic morning, then. One of the world’s oldest and most venerated democracies has finally staged the first ever election in its history that you can actually trust.

The first one ever not subject to the kind of mass voter fraud that the Tories were absolutely right to – at last – do something about.

That’s all changed now. Standing outside the Houses of Parliament on Friday morning, Tory MP Andrea Leadsom explained that the point of introducing new voter ID laws absolutely, definitely wasn’t to disenfranchise people who don’t vote Tory, even if some forms of ID like railcards are accepted for old people but not for the young.

There’s absolutely, definitely nothing dodgy about telling people they need to have formal ID in order to vote in a country in which having formal ID is not a legal requirement and, unless you go through the rigmarole of applying for a “Voter Authority Certificate”, will cost you about a hundred quid to get.

All this, Leadsom said, was to “increase confidence in the system”.

And yet, despite this increased confidence, she and her party colleagues spent a very long night and early morning staring down the barrel of various TV news cameras entirely unable to grasp what the public had told them, with absolute, legally-binding, photo-verified certainty.

The Tories lost Medway in Kent for the first time since 1998, which the local MP Kelly Tolhurst blamed on her own government’s housebuilding targets, for having forced them to build too many houses. Meanwhile her parliamentary colleague Charles Walker reckons the problem is that young people have abandoned the Conservatives because they’ve not built them enough homes to live in.

Before the polls opened, the Tories took every chance they could to spin an out-of-context bit of research which suggested they could lose 1,000 seats, in the desperate hope that when they only lost about 800, they could claim some kind of victory. At time of writing, they’re on course to smash through the 1,000-seat mark, which will confirm only one thing: that they are even more widely loathed than they dared to imagine.

Ms Leadsom reckoned it was “not a very good night for Labour.” To which you can only reply: well, they’ve had worse.

Doing his very best impression of the “this is fine” meme, in which a goofy cartoon hound sits in the middle of a burning kitchen sipping coffee, Rishi Sunak strolled out of Tory HQ to announce that he is “not detecting any massive groundswell of movement towards the Labour Party”.

Maybe he’s not. But what he should be detecting is a massive groundswell of movement of people that have absolutely had enough. That there are fully seven million people on NHS waiting lists, and another God-knows-how-many people waiting three months to see their GP just for the chance to make it onto a waiting list in the first place. That millions of parents still scarred by months of homeschooling suddenly have the kids at home again because their teachers are on strike. That they can’t get an ambulance, or even a train.

These are not, with all the best spin in the world, simply the aftershocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine. These are the aftershocks of, among several scandals, going to illegal parties in your own garden then pretending they never happened. Or trying to borrow tens of billions of pounds to give directly to already-rich people, which turns out to achieve absolutely nothing other than jacking up mortgage rates for everybody else, a tax on ordinary people quite correctly dubbed the “moron premium”. These are the aftershocks of the Bank of England having to intervene to save you from yourself.

Of course, one wonders whether the “increased confidence” that introducing voter ID was supposed to foster was required to make this kind of thing clear. One suspects it was obvious to begin with. But there’s no hiding from it now. Rishi Sunak may wish to stop pretending he can’t see the groundswell and start worrying a bit more about the clear and obvious fact that said ground has opened up beneath him. While his legs are still whirling, Wile E. Coyote style, he’s very much about to slip straight through it.