Sandcastles, no matter how big, are no match for waves

If Labour wins with a majority bigger than Tony Blair's, Keir Starmer will be hailed as a colossus. He will deserve to be. It doesn't matter how lucky he has been, or how much the Conservative Party appears to be run by secret agents of the opposition, the Labour leader has positioned himself astutely and not messed up.

- JOHN RENTOUL

It is surprising – to me, anyway – that the range of uncertainty about the likely outcome of the election now runs from a solid Labour majority to what Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, calls a “supermajority”.

Much of the debate among pollsters in the remaining 18 days of the campaign will be less about how to predict people’s votes than how to calculate how votes will translate into seats. You can feed current opinion polls into different models to produce anything from a Labour majority of 144 to one of 336.

I suspect that the consensus view will narrow towards the lower end of this range, although as the Nigel Farage Tory-wrecking drama unfolds, it might edge up a bit. In which case, Blair’s post-war record of a majority of 179 is likely to be broken.

There will be articles and later books written about the inside story of how the election was won. Morgan McSweeney, the campaign manager for the Labour Party, will be justly praised for seeing a way forward for Starmer as leader even as the party was heading for crushing defeat five years ago.

Starmer himself will become a case study in how centre-left parties can rebuild an electoral coalition of working-class patriots and middle-class liberals and take advantage of divisions on the right.