There is no gilding this result: it assures a Johnson-style Brexit, and his abiding style is fecklessness. It unfolded exactly as the Conservatives, the pollsters, the commentators predicted: it was won and lost on the “red wall”, Labour seats that hadn’t shifted since the 1950s toppling to the Conservatives.

Blyth Valley, which declared third, before midnight, said it all: except it didn’t, because a majority counted in three digits never really says anything. Workington was a decisive win for the Conservatives, and had the added boost of being an election meme – Workington man, always Labour, likes rugby, voted Brexit, wants it done – which came true. Labour gaining Putney was a bizarre flash, a recollection of something that seemed terribly important a mere 12 hours ago. Chingford and Woodford Green was especially painful, a stark reminder of what everyone knew: that if the Liberal Democrats and Labour had managed to come together, huge figures of the Conservative party could have been deprived a seat.

Jess Phillips as good as announced her leadership challenge in a Channel 4 interview just after 2am

But that wasn’t the story – the story was Wrexham, Leigh, Darlington, Bishop Auckland, Redcar, Burnley. When Wakefield and Heywood and Middleton went conservative, reality sunk in. When the Conservatives won Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s old seat, the atmospherics were complete.

All night, there was a mad scramble for the bright side: perhaps with a greater majority, the Conservatives would become less extreme, liberated from the demands of being in constant pitched battle to take a more balanced approach. Perhaps they would take so seriously the locus of their new-found support, delivering them the largest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s, that they would prioritise the pressing needs of those areas, put social care front and centre and Brexit on the backburner.

This is fantasy. Whoever feels “left behind” today should see how they feel tomorrow, or next month, or a year from now. The Conservatives have won the election on a manifesto and campaign whose only specific points were vindictive or authoritarian; the odd splenetic swipe at the Traveller community or the relationship between parliament and the executive, everything else formless, film-flam optimism and vague promises of the most cynical kind. They have had that approach resoundingly endorsed. We can look forward to a very united Conservative party; they do unity well at the best times, but in these worst of times, dissent is not part of their playbook.

The election count at the University of Bath. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

The Labour party, by contrast, has been catapulted immediately into conflict, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You cannot rebuild while pretending everything’s still standing. Jess Phillips as good as announced her leadership challenge in a Channel 4 interview just after 2am, with a Gestalt picture that was descriptive rather than analytical: “Trust in politics is so low that we have let a man who nobody trusts run the country.” Other voices – the curiously unenlightening Gareth Snell, blaming both Corbyn and the Brexit policy (too remain-y); oh, the brass-neck of Ken Livingstone (Corbyn didn’t deal with antisemitism fast enough); John McDonnell, blaming Brexit more as a poison in the culture than a policy issue; Ian Lavery, blaming his party for having even offered a second referendum – sketched out the battle ground, the result of which will anoint the next leader.

On paper, since they lost the red wall, that’s where they failed. They should have respected the referendum, come at the far-right Brexit with a Lexit, left the remoaners to the Lib Dems (whose showing was astoundingly poor). Yet also on paper, their only solid base is now among remainers, so maybe it would have been good to wonder why Labour voters were remain, what values and ambitions that represented, maybe articulated some of those as part of Labour’s identity, rather than banking them as schmucks with nowhere else to go and leaving Johnson to frame the debate.

That still leaves the question of Jeremy Corbyn himself, whose lack of popularity among voters was simply unignorable: poor old Richard Burgon struggled manfully to direct censure elsewhere, but the real fight has moved on from the fact of Corbyn’s poor ratings to the reason for them. Is his programme simply too far left, anathema to the stoic and sensible, non-restributive average Briton? Or was it an individual and organisational failure – simply put, that he just wandered off, seemed peevish and distant whenever he reappeared, and the people around him were much more focused on holding down his competitors than they were on winning an election? The second case, being more complex, will struggle to make itself heard in the coming days.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist