“I feel excellent,” said David Cliffe as he strode across Peterborough’s Cathedral Square, having contributed to a thumping Conservative majority. “I didn’t want to have a communist regime,” said the 71-year-old retired warehouseman. “The country would have been on its knees.”

Cliffe, who was on his way to book his mother a Christmas holiday in Scarborough, could not stop beaming about Boris Johnson’s Conservative landslide, which he reckoned meant Brexit was all but done.

“[Johnson] will be able to govern now,” said Cliffe’s wife, Ingrid, with zeal.

At Thursday’s polls the pro-Brexit Cambridgeshire city finally abandoned its brief flirtation with Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, ejected the Labour MP Lisa Forbes and threw in its lot with the Conservatives, giving them a convincing 2,580 majority by electing Paul Bristow as its MP.

Johnson’s gamble on voters being so tired of Brexit uncertainty that they would place the issue above everything else seems to have been shrewd. There was an air of giddy satisfaction among some that the win, both nationally and locally, was so clear after the tight referendum result and coalition and minority governments of recent years.

Paul Bristow, left, is joined by Stanley Johnson, centre, during campaigning earlier this month. Photograph: Terry Harris/Rex/Shutterstock

“At last it’s been emphatic,” said Ady Mowles, a debt collector and chairman of the Peterborough United supporters’ trust, who did not even vote for the Conservatives. “This was the referendum. The last one was shrouded in mystery. People think they know a bit more now.”

It was the Tory demolition of previously safe Labour “red wall” seats in the Midlands and north of England that extended Johnson’s parliamentary majority, but the rump of his win came from smaller swings in places such as Peterborough, and in extending slim majorities in seats like Hastings in East Sussex.

“Hastings was just like most of England,” said Peter Robb, a resident of the Labour target seat on the south coast. “The Tories won because people just want Brexit to happen, especially here among the fishermen, and they didn’t buy Corbyn.”

Both places struggle with challenges such as homelessness and pressures on public services, but it seems this election was not the time to address them, as hard as Labour tried.

“The Labour party dug their own grave choosing [Corbyn] as leader,” said Keith Gregg, a pensioner in Hastings.

No amount of determined campaigning by Labour candidates seemed capable of overcoming antipathy for the Labour leader. Alleged links to the IRA and Hezbollah were repeatedly cited, as were suspicions of communist sympathies. There was anger at his handling of antisemitism in the party and concerns over whether he was or is an antisemite. Tellingly, 43% of people who did not vote Labour gave the party’s leader as the main reason, polling released by Opinium on Friday showed.

Against all that – and the mantra-like repetition of the Conservatives’ “get Brexit done” slogan – Labour’s detailed manifesto failed to cut through. In Peterborough, where homelessness has risen more than 50% in the last year, encampments of tents by the River Nene have remained for months and churches have opened their doors as night shelters.

Voters enter a polling station in Peterborough. Photograph: Terry Harris/Rex/Shutterstock

But even the homeless were not paying attention to Labour’s proposal to build a million council houses. Paul Pluck, 47, until recently homeless, said he voted Labour at every other general election but this time abstained, suspecting a Labour government would not leave the EU.

Asked why he did not vote for Labour’s housing programme, he said: “I didn’t know anything about that. It was all Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.”

In both Peterborough and Hastings, the size of the Tory majority put some migrants on alert. “We have elected someone as prime minister who is a demagogue,” said Monika Veriopoulos in Hastings. “[It’s] a word we Greeks invented, which is perfect for him.”

George Viorel, 18, a Romanian barber in Peterborough, said: “We’ll go to Germany, Belgium and we’ll make money for them. I work 14-hour days and pay taxes. The English guys don’t like to work. They like to stay in bed and smoke marijuana.”

Bruised Labour voters awoke to a realisation that their party’s social reform programme had been overwhelmed. If anyone was going to keep the fabric of society together it might have to be them. “I feel sad for the people who are vulnerable and those on the lowest rungs of society,” said Zoe Bunter, a charity fundraiser and church volunteer who remarked that food banks and homeless shelters may have to become more permanent. “We are going to have to step up now.”