Amid Trump, and Brexit, and the political hurly-burly that now regularly grips mainland Europe, it is easy to get the impression that politics no longer follows hard-and-fast rules, and amounts instead to a series of unforeseen events and complete accidents.

Still, at the risk of sounding hopelessly old fashioned, let us remind ourselves of the political state we are in, what it would have once have entailed, and what has just happened in Cumbria and Stoke-on-Trent.

England is faced with a mounting NHS disaster, which blurs into a matching meltdown in adult social care. It is becoming increasingly clear that further cuts to the budgets of local councils are threatening truly frightening attacks on local services.

The remain vote is now Labour's urgent priority - Stoke and Copeland prove it | John Curtice Read more

On Brexit, quite apart from the general sense of confusion and denial at the top, this week brought news that contrary to all the shrill, often hateful hype both before and after the referendum, the government is set on continuing to allow as many low-skilled European migrant workers into the UK as it has in the past – which, given how much Brexiteers have banged on about these things, rather raises the question of what leaving the EU is intended to achieve. Theresa May regularly looks scared out of her wits; under harsh light, her government seems plagued with crises.

But so what? In the early hours of this morning, a strange magic came to pass in Copeland. The seat had been held by Labour since 1924. Ten years ago the party won it by nearly 20 percentage points. I know it well: much of the constituency revolves around the 10,000 people who work at Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, many of whom are loyal trade unionists.

Over the last few weeks, Labour had staged an energetic campaign focused on cuts to a big local hospital that serves 140,000 people, which seemed to chime with the national picture. And just after 3am, it was announced that the Tories had won, on a 6.7% swing away from the party of opposition.

Pundits and psephologists scrambled to put what had happened in context and make historical comparisons. Copeland was 30th on the Tory target list. The swing to the Tories, said the academic John Curtice, was bigger than even the disastrous national polls are suggesting.

The Tories are the first governing party to win a byelection since 1982. But never mind all that: the shadow cabinet minister Cat Smith reportedly reckoned that “to be 15-18 points behind the polls and to push the Tories within 2,000 votes is an incredible achievement.” I am not sure how you would describe that kind of thinking: it sounds distinctly like someone taking comfort from the fact that a complete disaster could conceivably have been even worse.

And so to some positives. In Stoke-on-Trent Central, there is a justified sense of relief about Labour having seen off Ukip, and the conclusive proof it represents that the latter party are largely useless at byelections (or, come to think of it, elections of any kind).

Though we should always be wary of voices claiming that Ukip have been dispatched for good, in the light of Paul Nuttall’s almost comical campaign, there is a clear sense of his party’s supposed threat to Labour in its working-class heartlands amounting to much less than some people would like to think.

Moreover, the Stoke result arguably says something about the new mass Labour party, and its potential effectiveness in the right circumstances: I was there last weekend, and there was something remarkable – moving, even – about all those car loads of activists (many filled by people from Momentum) coming to town to assist on the frontline of the battle against nasty populism.

And yet, and yet. Labour’s vote-share was still down on 2015. Ukip’s and the Tories’ both went up – as did the Liberal Democrats’, whose figure more than doubled. There was no great sense of the party’s national figures getting a hearing, let alone finding their voice.

Stoke and Copeland byelections: Corbyn allies blame disunity for Labour's historic defeat - Politics live Read more

Gareth Snell ran a very locally focused campaign, with elements that many Corbynites would have found distasteful (his use of the St George’s flag, for example). As has happened time and again in the past, turnout was miserable. In that sense, Stoke was less a triumph than a lesson in dogged campaigning, which highlighted the fact that the Labour leadership still has far too little to say to its alleged core vote.

In essence, we now find ourselves back where we were before both these contests started. Labour is racked by a deep, historic crisis that preceded the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn, but which his leadership seems to have immeasurably deepened.

You can just about see flashes of promise in its activist base, but the party remains more confused and vulnerable than it has ever been. Meanwhile, the Tories mismanage just about everything, and prosper: small wonder that as people clear up the debris of Storm Doris, the early morning of a February Friday feels replete with a weary kind of sadness.