It is a feature of very dark nights that they tend to be followed by particularly bright mornings – or at least that the contrast between the two states of being always seems to be remarkably sharp. The morning of 9 June 2017 in the United Kingdom was one such moment of sharpness: a morning of unexpected brightness after an otherwise long night of political darkness for centre-left parties on both sides of the Atlantic – a night that stretched back to at least the May 2010 general election in the UK case, and in the US one to the Republican Party’s recapture of the House of Representatives later in that same year (with that capture softened only slightly by Obama’s retention of the presidency in 2012). There was brightness for the UK centre-left in June 2017 in the fact that the election result was far better for the Labour Party than most commentators, including sympathetic ones, had thought likely; and there was brightness too in the simple partisan pleasure of watching more conservative political figures no longer sweep all before them. But elections always tell wider stories, and the one in June 2017 certainly did.