Keir Starmer has neither a heartland nor a stronghold. That is the picture likely to emerge once all the votes in this week’s local and devolved elections have been counted.

Council seats in Labour’s traditional northern-English working-class base will fall to Reform UK. Parts of inner London, where the electoral map has been red for decades, will go Green.

The Scottish National party will still be the biggest party at Holyrood, thwarting Labour’s hopes of ending its banishment from power there. If opinion polls are not mistaken and Plaid Cymru becomes the largest party in the Senedd, it will bring an epic run of Labour dominance in Welsh politics to an end. The party hasn’t been in opposition since the formation of a devolved assembly in 1999. And that record reflects a cultural primacy dating back a lot further.

Northern Ireland and Scotland already have first ministers whose parties are opposed to union with England. Wales will join that number if Plaid’s nationalist leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, forms the next government at Cardiff Bay.

That wouldn’t sound a death knell for the UK, but it would be a symbolic fracture. Downing Street will look ridiculous trying to pretend that such results are an expression of normal midterm turbulence. Even in the best-case scenarios available to Labour from current polling, Starmer will look like the caretaker leader of a party that struggles to say who its core voters are or where they might live. (Manchester, maybe.)

The Conservatives are not faring much better. Their electoral base has been partitioned along a Brexit faultline. Reform appeals to angry, disillusioned leave voters. The Liberal Democrats are consolidating their hold over the remainer belt in what used to be true-blue Tory suburbs and shires. The two-party duopoly that defined British political competition in the 20th century has broken down everywhere, except the........

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