A general election is coming, and Boris Johnson’s ruthlessness in preparing for it has provoked private pangs of jealous admiration among prominent leftwingers. There’s no messing around here: opponents and critics have been purged and an unapologetic hard-right, ultra-Brexit administration has been formed. Where Jeremy Corbyn would be denounced for Stalinist authoritarianism, Johnson is applauded for strong decisive leadership. Life is easier, I suppose, when you have most of the press and your own MPs enthusiastically on side. Today’s Sun newspaper splashes with Johnson’s face superimposed on an image of the sun, with the headline “JOHNSUN”: Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea’s ruling party, would have been too embarrassed to print something so fawning.

The funeral rites for Corbynism are being read by those who seem to have forgotten that, just over two years ago, the election campaign began with Theresa May enjoying higher approval ratings than Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher at their peak, and with Labour 24 points behind the Tories. In some current polls, Labour is still ahead.

That isn’t to pretend Labour is in a good place now – it isn’t. The Brexit culture war has sapped the party’s sense of insurgency and caused rampant disillusionment among its 2017 electoral coalition. At an anti-Boris Johnson protest organised by radical grassroots movements on Wednesday, I encountered profound disenchantment with Labour, a sense that the party isn’t present, and a repeated demand that they “step up”. This should be core “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” territory: it’s worrying for the party’s prospects that at present, it is not.

Senior Corbyn aides bemoan the fact they can only get meaningful attention in the media during a party conference or a general election; there’s some truth to that. As soon as Johnson gets his election – which he will frame as imposed upon him by a recalcitrant EU and a parliament blocking the “will of the people” – broadcasting rules kick in, allowing Labour to address the public unfiltered; the party’s popular domestic policies to be front and centre; the reality of a choice between a no-deal Johnson government and a Labour administration to kick in; an uptick in political interest making pro-Labour video content to go viral; and the party to mobilise its mass membership.

But there are things Labour must do now. Johnson is attempting to clothe a disastrous disordered exit from the EU and reheated Thatcherite economics in the garb of optimism. He wants to frame his opponents as miserable pessimists who don’t really like their own country and want to do it down. Labour must warn of the assaults on living standards and people’s rights, freedoms and security, but it must also marry that with an optimistic message about what could be achieved under a different government.

A new Britain is within reach: one run in the interests of the majority, not the elites. The wealth and resources exist to abolish every injustice and social blight, from the housing crisis to crisis-riddled public services and tuition fees. Labour can do much more than match Johnson’s hollow optimism – it has a vision that has concrete proposals and is actually achievable.

The lack of Corbyn’s media visibility must be fixed by picking fights with unpopular vested interests, reviving the party’s “many not the few” narrative. That should be combined with an effort to pin down the new prime minister as a creature of the establishment: he personifies its entitlement, incompetence and complete divorce from the lived experience of millions who have suffered the worst squeeze in living standards for generations. Polling reveals Johnson is particularly weak with women: Labour must put pro-women policies at the forefront of its efforts.

If you are a voter that made Brexit the political hill to die on, why would you vote for Labour in any case?

And then there’s the Brexit problem. Labour has haemorrhaged far more support to the Lib Dems and the Greens than to Nigel Farage’s new outfit. It attempted to find compromise in a divided nation, but as that divide has become more polarised and vicious, it increasingly looked like shifty, cynical triangulation to both sides of the debate. It has now embraced the call for a second referendum and to campaign for remain in current circumstances, but a divide at the top still exists on how best to proceed.

While John McDonnell and Diane Abbott are among those who’ve pushed for a pivot to remain, one senior Labour figure warns that an unapologetically pro-remain stance will destroy any chance of winning a majority, leaving the possibility of becoming the biggest single party as the only available prize. But given the likelihood that most of Labour’s voters in leave seats backed remain, if remainers were to defect en masse, the party would be sunk.

And if you are a voter that has now made Brexit the political hill to die on, why would you vote for Labour in any case? Nobody seems to believe that a “soft Brexit” is genuinely Brexit any more. Labour’s clause V process – which decides the party’s manifesto – will surely impose a referendum-with-remain stance before an election. The party should embrace it and make the best of it now, or risk demobilising the base, alienating possible voters and being distracted during the campaign period, which will mean it is unable to draw attention to the party’s transformative domestic agenda.

In our uniquely tumultuous times there is no guarantee of either political success or failure, and pundits should be relentlessly reminded of this. Remember the hubris of May, and remember the nemesis that it met. Johnson’s hard-right cheerleaders are currently intoxicated with triumphalism. But if Labour makes the right decisions now, a painful hangover may yet await.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist