It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage who best summed up the reason for Labour’s electoral armageddon.

He said: “People have got the message that we are for (those) who get up in the morning and go to work to pay for all the other people who think staying at home is a lifestyle choice.”

And there can surely be no more brutally honest assessment of how a party founded on the principles of workers’ rights and fairness has abandoned its roots. And, as a result, suffered irreparable consequences.

Few people – himself included – really know what Sir Keir Starmer stands for.

But across Britain, people have got the message that under this lifeless prime minister, welfare is placed above work, Palestine is more important than public services, resetting relations with the EU is a higher priority than fixing potholes, and taxing wealth is more important than generating it.

The bulk of the electorate – and remember these were local elections that Labour tried to cancel – are not political animals. They are every day men and women trying to get by and get on.

But one thing that unites them is their almost universal hatred of a prime minister and Government that looks down on them for wanting the interests of Britain put first.

The majority do not protest, demonstrate, or wave banners. They are most certainly not violent.

So their only means was to cast a vote.

The result? A peasant’s revolt.

Cornered Starmer’s answer? Dig up Labour relics Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman – combined age 150 – and appoint them as advisors.

You really couldn’t make it up.

Brown, who never had a mandate from the electorate because he never stood at a General Election, led Labour to defeat in 2010.

He famously possesses a moral compass, but will be hard pushed to help Starmer navigate his way out of the mess he finds himself in.

After the local election results – an effective referendum on Starmer and the disastrous Government he leads from crisis to crisis – his time’s up.

His last throw of the dice was to bring in two dinosaurs, relics from the past, to offer tea and sympathy and act as human shields. It will only make matters worse and is a slap in the face to voters.

The traditional two-party system of Labour and the Tories is dead. And Reform UK’s spectacular result – just shy of 1,500 seats won – is down to one simple reason: the abject failure of the political establishment to stand up for the average man and woman.

When a Government abandons pensioners, seeing them as an expendable demographic, turns its back on farmers, who put food on our tables, inflicts £66bn of tax rises in successive budgets on those grafting hard to make lives better, but ramps up welfare spending to pay the way of the feckless and idle, fails to stamp out extreme antisemitism and sneers at those who proudly fly the cross of St George, and pursues a prohibitively expensive net zero agenda when the cost of living shows no sign of ending, then you reap what you sow.

The public can spot a duplicitous prime minister when they see one.

How else can you explain May 7? This wasn’t just a protest vote, it was a revolt – a cry for help from millions silenced by Starmer and his socialist regime.

In Wigan – held by Labour since 1918 – Reform won 24 of 25 seats.

In Barnsley, Labour lost control of the council after 50 years.

And in Wakefield, Labour had 57 of 63 councillors but now has just one. Reform has 58. The Lib Dems are the second-largest party, with two councillors.

But it was in Wales – the very heartbeat of Labour and a fiercely proud country that embodies the working class – that the die was cast.

Indelibly linked to its industrial communities and coal-mining valleys, the country that produced Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and Neil Kinnock, turned its back on the party and ran into the arms of Plaid Cymru and Reform UK.

The biggest surprise was that these results were not really a surprise at all.

Because this is what happens when you betray the people you looked in the eye and promised change for.

Britain is fed up with being taken for granted and taken for a ride.