Asked to name her greatest political achievement, Margaret Thatcher, long after getting dumped by her Tories in 1990, accurately remarked that it was nudging the Labour Party well to the right. Thatcher’s rigid free enterprise stance (which really requires enormous state aid) shrank the political arena so that only devout market enthusiasts, like Tony Blair, and his still influential acolytes inside Labour, could play in it. For ebullient British elites the UK remained in their manicured hands no matter which major party won.

When Blair entered 10 Downing Street in 1997 he ruled out restoring taxes on the super rich, ditched party advocacy of nationalisation, cozied up to reactionary media barons, introduced the first university tuition fees (which instantly escalated), peddled public-private partnerships which proved extremely costly to the state, pandered to slick City financiers, and embraced deregulation. Blair’s “New Labour” also abandoned what it derided in private as an obsolete and bigoted working class who had nowhere else to go, or so they reckoned.

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Boris Johnson is Prime Minister today as a result of that daft miscalculation, and the nauseous irony of the election is that Blairites are far more to blame than Jeremy Corbyn whom they lacerated, undermined and sabotaged for the last four years. After a brief glitzy “cool Britannia” period, Blair’s boasted “pragmatic” policies ended in a colossal financial crash and a pair of unjustified and expensive wars. An upward redistribution of wealth continued apace and the Tories slipped back into power again in 2010.

Yet nothing is better calculated to make Blairites recoil in choreographed horror than the spectre of a return of the “bad old days” of the 1970s when Britain supposedly was falling to rack and ruin, all the fault of rapacious labour unions. Except the story wasn’t remotely true. Britain and its people ~ meaning all strata below the top 10 per cent ~ did far better in the 1970s than at any time after. It was the last decade in which prosperity was shared below the upper middle class, which is why conservatives hate it so much. The industrial jobs supporting decent lifestyles for (especially) Northern working class Labour voters shrivelled from 7 million in 1979 to 2.5 million by 2000 and continues to bleed away.

The European Union, whatever its benefits, undeniably opened labour markets so that hard-hit Northerners watched immigrants pour in. Lacking help from unconcerned Tory and New Labour governments to reverse their falling living standards, many angry working class voters grasped Brexit as an all-purpose remedy, and the only one they could count on. Blair’s New Labour ~ opportunistic middle class technocrats and managers ~ looked no more sympathetic to working class voters than than did the Tories who, however, promised to honour the Brexit referendum.

Both major parties since Thatcher presided over an upward hoovering of wealth and incomes, dragging Britain back towards a less than quaint “Upstairs/Downstairs” condition of a century ago. The results are a capital city where no one with an average wage can afford to live decently, a National Health Service steadily dismantled through stealth, and a generation of young people who, if their parents aren’t rich, haven’t got a prayer of getting out of debt once they leave University, if they can afford to go at all. The bottom 50 per cent of the population hold only 9 per cent of the wealth and their incomes are falling.

Despite or more likely because of that, the British media, including BBC, are, according to a Loughborough University study, ferocious attack dogs against intruders who promise to spread the wealth. Hence, Jeremy Corbyn’s scarily genuine social democratic policies drew unceasing opprobrium since he became Labour Party leader four years ago. Preposterous charges of antisemitism in Labour did damage, as the Conservatives (rife with racism and class entitlement) calculated.

A Tory candidate proposed dispatching tenants causing the slightest trouble in public housing to labour camps. Boris Johnson long ago ridiculed feckless working class voters, which was duly forgotten. The Tories ran a skewed economy where inequality intensified, homelessness doubled (including 135,000 children), growth slowed, and over 800 libraries closed, yet Boris & Company were depicted as sober stewards of the common good. In 2017 Corbyn shocked the Tories by denying them a majority when he showed that with unfiltered media access he could win voters.

There was hope in December as the Tory margin diminished to single digits a few days before the election, but Corbyn was ensnared in a Brexit dilemma no imaginable leader could wriggle out of. A Labour majority are remainers who, like leavers, are implacable. Corbyn, a eurosceptic, finally and fatally mollified his Remain wing, who thoroughly deluded themselves that repentant Brexiters had seen the errors of their ways, with a second referendum. Corbyn at that moment became dead meat, just another betrayer. The leavers bridled against the class contempt of the Remainers (whom Corbyn didn’t like much either), and switched to whatever chancer would deliver Brexit.

The Tory vote on average increased 6 per cent in Leave constituencies. Brexit inflated into a vision of salvation for deeply embittered people. Today, Remainers blame Corbyn for an outcome they themselves were most culpable for. The turning point was not Corbyn’s programme but his concession to remainers. Every UK newscast now consists of overpaid anchors blaming Corbyn alone, whose programme their bosses want to rub out. Boris Johnson, effete and elite, is appointed saviour of the working class. Call this dispiriting election result a BBC production and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

(The writers are well-known commentators and the authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and many other books)