There is a tendency following an election to seek a single overarching explanation for the outcome. This is not only quixotic but reductive: politics is a messy business and cannot be tidily explained as political scientists and pundits would wish.

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Scotland is a case in point. It’s tempting to conclude the outcome was all down to the prospect of another independence referendum, opposition to Brexit or the revival of the leftwing vote but, in reality, it was a combination of all three.

Conservatives gained due to a pro-union (and Brexit) vote in more rural parts of the country, while Labour received a fillip from leftwing, soft-nationalist voters who deserted them last time round. Jeremy Corbyn helped in that respect, and so did his party’s (often inconsistent) opposition to another referendum.

In other words, the SNP’s hitherto successful strategy of being all things to all men has finally run out of steam. For years, it has appealed to Tories in some constituencies, Labour in others – but you cannot please all of the people all of the time. Symbolic in this respect was the defeat of former party leader and first minister Alex Salmond, the political chameleon par excellence, radical in Scotland’s central belt, farmer’s friend in the rural north-east.

Not for the first time, the winners in this election ended up the losers, and vice versa. By any measurement, the SNP “won” the contest north of the border; getting 35 seats and 37% of the vote is impressive for a party that until two years ago only managed half a dozen MPs and a fifth of the vote. But the 2015 landslide set an impossible standard which, after a decade in devolved government, it was always going to struggle to repeat. As ever, expectations matter almost as much as results.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A few years ago, Nicola Sturgeon won voters enticed by utopian visions of a better society; now many of them have turned to Jeremy Corbyn.’ Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Nationalists also found themselves under assault from several different directions. Not only did the party lose the unionist voters they won over in 2015 (attracted by the idea of a big SNP group at Westminster, if not independence), but also younger voters enticed by the utopian visions of a better society. A few years ago, Nicola Sturgeon embodied that spirit, now it belongs to Corbyn, who placed left-leaning supporters of independence in a bit of a bind: should they support a “progressive” agenda across the whole of the UK or just in Scotland?

The prospect of another independence vote, meanwhile, is clearly a vote loser, which is a bit of a problem for a party committed, ultimately, to independence. The first minister and her colleagues tried to play it down, as they have in previous elections, but that was hardly sustainable given the fact that Sturgeon called for a second vote just a few months ago. You cannot demand your constitutional cake and fail to eat it. Finally, the Scottish government’s mediocre record – not least when it comes to education – was a consistent feature of the election campaign, and not in a helpful way.

It’s also difficult to see how the SNP can regain momentum and the positive, upbeat narrative it once articulated so effectively. Banging on about independence puts people off, while two nationalist tropes – that Scotland is inherently “anti-Tory” and the Scottish Labour party ineffective and Blairite – now look pretty threadbare. And given its troubles on the domestic front, a once justified reputation for “competence” is also subject to the law of diminishing returns.

That leaves Brexit, but if the logic of this election is a softer exit than previously envisaged, with continuing membership of the single market and the harder edges removed through parliamentary necessity, then Sturgeon’s chief rationale for a second independence ballot is neutered. So, a referendum she once described, ad nauseam, as “highly likely”, looks increasingly unlikely before 2021, or even soon after that. The momentum has gone.

Despite some grumbling, Sturgeon is safe as SNP leader, but her challenges – domestic, strategic and personal – now look formidable. Two years ago, she was depicted in some quarters as the “most dangerous woman in Britain” but now, paradoxically, the union (British if not European) looks safer than it’s been in several years.