The outcome of the 2024 general election owed much to the collapse of the winning Conservative electoral coalition that Boris Johnson helped construct in 2019. That collapse scattered voters in multiple directions and, while the governing party’s woes helped put Labour in pole position in a large majority of seats, it was not accompanied by any surge in support for the opposition. Instead, the dominant theme of this election, alongside the decline of incumbents (the SNP and Welsh Labour, as well as the Conservatives), was fragmentation: Reform UK posted a record showing on the radical right, while Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Independent/minor party candidates all advanced in different areas and with different groups of voters on the left. The brief, Brexit-driven return of two-party politics in 2017 and 2019 fully unwound in 2024, and the deeper trend of party system change, which had been evident for several decades before 2017, returned with a vengeance.