Closer to home, the Conservatives (and, to be fair, Labour moderates) had failed to grasp that the political center was defined in one way in Westminster and in quite another in the country at large. The Conservatives were correct, on policy grounds, to attack Labour’s plans for the reversal of some of the privatizations of the past decades, but they were wrong to think that those plans would be viewed as extreme. According to a YouGov poll taken in the middle of the campaign, some two-thirds of respondents wanted to see the renationalization of the Royal Mail (post office), while 60 percent (including 44 percent of Tory supporters) favored the renationalization of the railway companies. Labour’s proposed tax increases on the top 5 percent played well too.

Where the real center of British politics now lies is hard to say, but, very broadly speaking, it has been moving to the left for a long time, not least under Blair (more radical than often realized)—a direction the Tories have been unable to reverse. Quite why this should be is complicated, but the growing diversity of the electorate is a part of it (the Conservatives have struggled to win over ethnic minorities, securing only an estimated 17 percent of their vote in 2017, and, a scandal this year over immigration is likely to make that task even more arduous). To go all Gramsci, the cultural hegemony of (various varieties of) the Left has also weighed heavily. That is true of the entertainment sector, broadcast media (the fundamentally center-left BBC remains the dominant news provider), the law, the National Health Service (and the perennial debate that surrounds it), education (approximately 8 percent of school teachers voted Conservative, and, as for the universities, well…) and in plenty of other areas besides.

The Tories had to contend with more immediate vulnerabilities too. Voters were weary of austerity (Labour promised much more spending, but tax increases would be focused on, of course, other people—the ‘rich’ and corporations, principally). Years of wage stagnation had also soured the mood. But the Conservatives’ most alarming weakness was generational. According to YouGov, they trounced Labour among the over fifties (with the size of their majority increasing with the age of the voter), but fell far short with everyone else. The younger the voter the worse the Tories did, partly because that’s almost always the case, partly because Britain’s cultural and demographic change is more pronounced in younger age cohorts, and partly because of the unlikely aura of cool surrounding Labour’s eccentric and seemingly benign grandpa, a performer so good, when it suits him, at concealing his inner steel—he divorced his second wife largely over her insistence on an ideologically inappropriate school for their son—that a swordstick would be impressed.

More substantively, high house prices, rising rents and stagnant wages are preventing many younger Britons from buying their own home (the added indebtedness caused by still bitterly resented university tuition fees, introduced at the end of the century and substantially hiked since, doesn’t help either: in its manifesto Labour undertook to scrap them). Home ownership rates are at their lowest level (around 63 percent) for thirty years, and it is the younger generation who have borne the brunt of that decline. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, home ownership rates for those between the age of 25–34 fell from 55 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2016.

“I want,” said Mrs. Thatcher in 1983, “a capital-owning democracy. Housing is the start. If you’re a man or woman of property, you’ve got something.” Her political logic was impeccable, and, for a long time, it worked. It could do so again, but there is no easy fix to the current mess. Instead, Generation Rent is left with its nose pressed against realtors’ windows—windows it must be tempted to smash. Without capital, the young won’t rally behind capitalism. Labour meanwhile promised a major boost to homebuilding and, regardless of how counterproductive they have historically been, tougher controls on landlords.

Then there’s Brexit. The majority of Cameron’s cabinet (including May) campaigned, with varying degrees of enthusiasm against it. But it was Cameron who called the referendum and most Conservatives voted for the break with Brussels. In the eyes of the electorate, Brexit is the Tories’ baby, and, after the referendum, the party hierarchy adopted it. “Brexit means Brexit,” proclaimed May. This brought the Conservatives some gains outside their traditional comfort zone, but protest votes by embittered Tory Remainers almost certainly cost them a greater number of seats within their affluent heartland, territory where people did not feel ‘left behind’ and were anxious about what Brexit could mean for business. Identification of the Conservatives as the Brexit party also widened the generation chasm, reinforcing the perception among younger voters, who generally supported Remain, that the Tories were the party of the past, Little Englanders and worse.

None of this accounts for the sudden collapse in Conservative support in the final weeks before the 2017 vote—that was due to the Tories’ self-inflicted wounds and an increasingly impressive Labour campaign—but it helps explain why it fell as far and as fast as it did.

The problem for the Conservatives in 2018 is that not much has changed. Their apparent reprieve in this year’s local elections will probably only be a temporary embarrassment for Corbyn. If May is lucky, it could transform a war of movement into one of attrition (at the time of writing, Corbyn’s personal approval ratings—never high—have slipped below May’s uninspiring tally), but the two sides remain dangerously closely matched: a Labour victory could be just one recession away (the next election is due in 2022). The current recovery, however lackluster, has already lasted a reasonably long time, something that ought to mean that a downturn is on the way—a downturn that would be accelerated, deepened and prolonged by a botched Brexit.

Anything written today about the form that Brexit eventually takes will be rapidly overtaken by events. Nevertheless, as matters now stand, the most straightforward solution, the more or less off-the-shelf ‘Norway option’ (leaving the EU, but remaining within the ‘Single Market’), a solution seemingly acceptable to Brussels, has been rejected by the British government, and, tellingly, not solely because of Brexit hardliners. May is still hunting a dream, a middle way that she likes (and can sell both to her parliamentary colleagues and the EU) between two election-losing alternatives, a highly disruptive ‘hard’ Brexit or one so ‘soft’ that trying to force it through splits her party, alienates former Labour Leavers—or both. Raising the stakes still further, if the EU rejects May’s final proposal, the UK will crash out of the union, resulting in a chaotic, hardest-of-all Brexits, a finale more electorally poisonous than all the rest.

Corbyn will try to sit tight, doing his best—it’s getting trickier—to maintain the artful ambiguity that has served him so well on Brexit. Whatever Remainer platitudes Labour’s ‘absolute boy’ may have muttered during the referendum, he has been a Brexiteer for decades, principally—whatever he may say about the matter—because he sees it as an obstacle to building a properly socialist state. But he is also well aware that some 70 percent of Labour voters wanted to stay in the EU, and that his party has, on balance, benefited from being viewed as the party of Remain.

In February, Corbyn recommended that the UK should enter into a customs union with the EU—something the Conservatives have, for what may be a very temporary now, rejected—but quit the Single Market. Politically that could achieve what Corbyn wants. It sends a useful signal to Remainers, leaves the Tories stuck in their Brexit mare’s nest and, should such a deal actually be struck, it would not block his designs on the economy. Corbyn is also under some pressure to help efforts to stay in the Single Market. In the implausible event he agreed, it would in all probability only be as a device to harass the Tories and only if there was no chance that his assistance would make a material difference. The (more or less) economically liberal discipline underpinning the Single Market cannot ultimately be reconciled with his longer-term vision for Britain.

Masterly inactivity comes with another advantage for Corbyn. It is presently envisaged that the UK’s formal departure from the EU in March 2019 will be followed by a transition period until December 2020. That date ensures that Brexit will still be fresh in the memories of many Remainers when they vote in the next general election, currently scheduled for May 2022. They will be angrier still if there is a recession between now and then. Rightly or wrongly, a downturn is, even if only partly, bound to be blamed on Brexit. Another risk for the Conservatives is that with Brexit a definitively done deal by the end of the transition period (even, if as is now being suggested, transitional customs arrangements are kept going past 2020) some Leavers who left Labour over Brexit may well feel that it is safe to return to the fold—especially if a recession has rekindled old class loyalties.