We are heading for a traumatic election night – but the fightback begins as soon as the exit poll is released

So long as the next Labour leader asks the right questions, the answers are already there

The hunt for solace starts earlier than ever, and with a lie blatant enough to do honour to Boris Johnson himself.

But here it is all the same: if this malignant general election ends as expected, progressives should console themselves that this is as bad as it will ever get.

That’s the Johnsonian whopper. It can always get worse, and in this case it almost certainly will. And this election may not end as predicted. There remains that toxic tendril of hope that tactical voting and an electrifying surge in young adults doing the decent thing will combine to deliver a hung parliament.

But assuming Hugh Grant hasn’t persuaded enough people to vote “Anyone But the Tory”, and in the absence of polling station lines resembling queues for early Nineties Hacienda raves, we would appear to be utterly and irredeemably screwed.

Several seconds after 10pm on Thursday night, John Curtice’s exit poll will charge across the top of the screen with the pulverising might of the four horsemen of the apocalypse galloping over your psyche.

Nothing will quite have prepared us for this one. Not the shock of 1992, when shy Tory syndrome ridiculed the polls to give John Major a small majority on a popular vote mini-landslide. Not 2015, when something spookily similar did just that for David Cameron. Not even the Brexit-Trump double whammy of doom in 2016.

This time, the entrenchment of incredulous despair will make it more lingeringly traumatic. Any residual hope of avoiding a brutal and self-mutilating departure from the EU will be gone. Added to that will be a grinding sense of nihilistic bemusement that our compatriots have elected a man whom they by and large know for, at best, a shallow narcissist willing to burn his country in the impossible quest to lay some daddy issues from the nursery.

How, the despondent will howl at the moon, could the people of this country – or the forty-something per cent of them required under this miserable system for an elective dictatorship – be so wilfully stupid?

After almost a decade of Tory and Tory-led governments inflicting needless economic agony on millions, degrading the health service and running the criminal justice into the dirt, how could they buy what this charmless sub-Terry-Thomas turn from history’s most mirthless Ealing comedy was selling?

If recent history teaches anything, it is that this is absolutely the wrong question. “How could they be so dumb?” is the question Blairite metropolitans – the entitled who took Brexit as a personal attack at the value of their holiday homes in Provence by Neanderthal savages – have been asking for 40 months. It’s pretty much the question too many Democrats have been asking in the US for two years.

The right question, better late than never, is how to persuade those who live in genuinely abject despair that the values of the centre-left are better suited to improving their lives than those of the hard right.

Those values are not about to be defeated even if those espousing them are. Labour’s apparently lethal problem in its former northern and midlands strongholds has nothing to do with its manifesto, something to do with Brexit, and more to do with its leader.

His replacement will inherit a vibrant mass movement of some half a million souls, an unmissable chance to draw a line under antisemitism, and the freedom to unite the party and utilise the appeal of such talented populist communicators as Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy.

That leader will be able to dispense with the narrowly sectarian style of leadership with which Corbyn has isolated himself in the rubberised cell of stubborn dither. She or he – preferably she, as if that needs stating – will have the mischievous luxury of pulling Johnson to pieces as his imbecilic promise to “get Brexit done” collapses into a chaotic dash for trade deals with the EU and the US in which he will have approximately zero leverage.

Within 12 months, that new leader should be sitting on a mammoth poll lead which a shrinking economy would leave the Tories powerless to narrow. If Neil Kinnock’s loss in 1992 to a fatigued Conservative Party revived under new management is the template, it’s worth recalling that on that dismal night, every Labour supporter in the country had this same thought: if we can’t beat them under these conditions, we never will. Within weeks, the ERM fiasco of Black Wednesday destroyed the government’s credibility. It never recovered.

Half a decade under Johnson will feel like an eternity in a circle of hell Dante never even got around to missing. No one in their right mind will ask (to paraphrase David Bowie): five years, is that all we got?.

But in the long and anguished annals of bewaring what you wish there, there won’t have been much like this. The legacy Johnson will have bequeathed to himself will be a ravaged economy, diminished global status, and the white hot fury the gullible reserve for the grifter who took advantage of their trust.

So long as the next Labour leader asks the right questions, the answers are already there – and no level of collusive mutual pleasuring between between a rank government and a vicious media will disguise that. If John Curtice’s exit poll conforms to expectations at 22:00:30 on Thursday, the fightback begins at 10.01pm.