In a crowded and overheated bar towards the end of the evening a few months ago, I received some strange parenting advice from one of those “Labour strategist” types.

We were discussing – maybe arguing – over the government’s position on Gaza. Eventually I asked if he could provide me with a decent explanation to give my son who had shown me stuff on his phone a couple of days earlier about how Israeli army officers were still being trained by Britain’s military. “Here’s what you say to your son,” began his reply, followed by a portentous pause that made me lean in closer. “You should tell him to fuck off.”

To be clear, I’m not recalling this episode now just to have a dig at someone who has usually seemed one of the nicer ones. And doubtless he would say I was irritating him in all kinds of ways. Nonetheless, the exchange strikes me as symptomatic of an attitude to a whole swathe of voters who have been taken for granted by Labour for far too long.

There has been a factional antagonism towards anyone who might wave a Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza or yearns to rejoin the European Union, as well as to those who worry a lot about climate change or display too much sympathy for asylum seekers. For much of the past six years under Keir Starmer, his advisers have been dismissive of such viewpoints, which they thought would alienate the older, whiter and more traditionally working-class voters widely regarded as vital to electoral success.

Yet on Thursday, in the previously rock-solid Labour constituency of Gorton and Denton, the party finished in a disastrous third place. And a lot more of its former supporters voted for the victorious Green party than defected to the rightwing populists of Reform. There were some specific local factors in this seat, including a high proportion of Muslim voters who are particularly angry about Gaza, or possibly some hangover from a decision not to give the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, special permission to stand.

The result of this........

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