Britain’s recent general election proceeded largely along lines that had been visible long in advance. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was evicted from Downing Street, unmourned by all, for the hollow managerialism of Keir Starmer, while 175 Tory MPs including several among party high command were felled by a great national wave of apathetic assent for Grey Labour. At the top of British politics after fourteen years of Conservative rule, everything has changed so that everything may remain the same.

But while the consensual transfer of government authority between establishment parties unfolded as expected at the national level, a score of underdog challenges to the Labour ascendancy from its left produced an unexpected, welcome disruption to Starmer’s fantasy coronation. Multiple presumptive Labour ministers — notably the patrician Thangam Debbonaire and the abject Jonathan Ashworth — went down to defeat by Green and independent insurgents. Several surviving Labour MPs saw their previously impregnable majorities cut to the bone by local tribunes channeling popular indignation over Gaza.

But the most prominent such upset came in London’s Islington North constituency. Here former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, standing as an independent in the seat he had represented as a socialist Labour MP since 1983, faced concentrated efforts by Labour’s Starmerite management to expunge him from national life. A dramatic election night saw the independent socialist incumbent win 24,120 votes to official Labour candidate (and private-health-care evangelist) Praful Nargund’s 16,873.