It’s six weeks since Rishi Sunak ran up the white flag, announcing the long-awaited election sure to finish off fourteen years of Conservative rule. Excepting Nigel Farage’s malodorous late entry as new leader of the hard-right Reform, the campaign has unfolded largely without drama. The obligatory televised head-to-heads between party leaders amounted to a bleak ceremonial changing-of-the guard, marking a transfer of power (if not a real break with Tory orthodoxy) that has long seemed a certainty.

This Friday is thus bound to see Keir Starmer anointed as prime minister. He will be lauded by the corporate media, having long since been rubber-stamped by the establishment, as the terminal exhaustion and exhibitionist criminality of this Tory party reached irrecoverable depths. Starmer reaches Downing Street atop an expensively embalmed but thoroughly dead Labour Party, his path carpeted with a torn-down and ritually desecrated red flag.

For socialists, the prevailing outlook nationally might reasonably be one of dejection. Starmer brings with him a rogues’ gallery of management consultants, corporate lobbyists, and neo-Blairite bag carriers. In government, his party looks set to link arms with whatever hard-right rump inhabits the opposition benches in exorcizing any alternative to the UK’s present carnival of reaction.