Winston Churchill lost to Labour’s Clement Atlee, ushering in the NHS, the welfare state and a new era of progressive politics. Margaret Thatcher won a landslide, a response to economic stagnation, industrial chaos and years of decline. Tony Blair trounced the Conservatives, bringing down the curtain on an exhausted, deeply unpopular government.

These three general elections – 1945, 1979 and 1997 – are surely the most significant in living memory. Yet the election of 2019 must now rank among them, a momentous juncture in our country’s history.

More than an unexpected landslide, last Thursday’s vote marked nothing less than a political reconfiguration. While Brexit grabbed the headlines, the really astonishing story is that for the first time in the history of British democracy, the Conservatives are no longer the party of the rich. Boris Johnson won middle-class backing, but the polling fine print shows, incredibly, that the Tories beat Labour by a wider margin among those with incomes under £20,000 than those earning over £70,000.