Rafael Behr/ The Guardian:

Amid the cacophony of post-election analysis over the weekend, one item struck me as especially bleak for Rishi Sunak. It wasn’t the byelection defeat or the seismic swing away from the Tories. It wasn’t even in a news programme. It was an advert.
“Britain hasn’t been so great of late,” says a pastiche scientist. “Economical, societal and sporting performance has dropped.” The reason: not enough Weetabix.
Why is this so bad for Sunak? Breakfast habits do not dictate national wellbeing. But consumer brands strive for political neutrality for fear of alienating customers. Weetabix wouldn’t run a marketing campaign claiming Britain feels down in the dumps if that were a provocative assertion. But it is uncontroversial. And if it barely even counts as a political statement to say the country feels rubbish, the government presiding over the slump is in serious trouble.
The Weetabix index is supported by opinion polls. In a recent survey by More in Common, a civil society organisation, voters were asked to describe the UK in a word. The top choices were “broken”, “mess”, “struggling”, “divided”, “expensive”, “poor” and “chaotic”. Labour is shrewdly exploiting the mood. The party has launched a digital campaign based on a spoof streaming service, Conflix, showcasing episodes of scandal and incompetence. A general election is pitched as the season finale – a chance to end “14 long years” of Tory “chaos and decline”.
It is effective because the premise is secure. The gloom is common to voters from different parts of the country and very different backgrounds. That means they also might have incompatible views on what needs to be done differently. Pessimism is good for dissolving incumbent power, but not great as an adhesive, binding people to any replacement government. In the gaps where enthusiasm for Labour is hard to discern, the Tories forage for solace. The prime minister has seized on one polling device that extrapolates last week’s results into national vote shares (Labour 35%; Tories 26%) and feeds those numbers into a hypothetical general election. The outcome is a hung parliament.
It could happen, although the model inflates the likelihood by ignoring Scotland and assuming that Liberal Democrats and Greens will do as well in a national ballot as they do in local contests. Even if smaller parties surge at a general election, most of the energy will be tactically directed to inflict maximum harm on the Tories.Labour is winning big on a relatively humble vote-share percentage by knowing exactly where it needs the biggest swings, and who will turn out on the day. There are many subplots in last week’s results, but the big story was a tale of Keir Starmer’s method working. More precisely, it was a vindication of the strategic focus brought by Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the campaign director and coordinator respectively.
The centrality of data-heavy vote-mining to Starmer’s operation is often cited by critics as a symptom of shallowness. The charge is that Labour is bundling an insipid leader over the line with a flimsily stitched electoral coalition that will unravel as soon as it snags on the sharp end of government.
That analysis gets traction because it comes from two angles. It is a comfort for Tories who want to believe they will get back in the game quickly post-defeat. And it is the lament of a disgruntled left that sees itself as the custodian of the Labour soul, resents its marginalisation by Starmer and presumes that any victory bought at a Faustian price must be followed by damnation.
The crucial item of polling evidence in belittling Labour’s prospects is the opposition leader’s lacklustre personal ratings. Starmer is nowhere near as popular as Tony Blair was on the eve of his 1997 landslide victory, nor even as well-liked as David Cameron in 2010, and he failed to secure an outright majority. Britain might be poised for regime change, but it won’t come in a surge of Starmermania. Comparison with past candidacies has limited value. When a long-serving prime minister leaves a lasting impression on the country, hindsight bias projects that influence further back than it actually goes. Britain was not a very Thatcherite place before 1979. Definitions of Blairism, whether positive or pejorative, are derived from choices.