Supreme Court ruling allowing water companies to be sued is a step in the right direction - David Behrens

It made the government watchdog Ofwat look particularly foolish; it’s only five weeks since it was proposing lower fines to bale out firms whose profits had leaked into the hands of corporate shareholders.

The court’s decision drew surprisingly little comment from a government that was already up a creek without a paddle. But the challenge of how to refinance the water industry and clean up our rivers will be one of the issues dominating the political agenda of the next five years.

It’s not just one sector of public life that is contaminated, though; it’s all of it. Water, transport, health, social care, education and the economy have all run aground and the outlook is even more depressing than it was after the last election.

In fact, looking back to my notes from that week in December 2019 I find I was quite upbeat. After three years of paralysis and prorogation we finally had clarity on Brexit, whether we liked it or not, and we could move forward. We didn’t know, of course, that the sunlit uplands to which Boris Johnson promised to lead us would be overcast by lockdown and war in Europe, or that Boris was, as we say in Yorkshire, all mouth and no trousers.

He was back in the spotlight this week as the opening act for Rishi Sunak at one of the last big rallies, prompting the then-PM to hail the “Conservative family reunited”. In reality we all know they’re as misanthropic as the Addams Family, with Boris the creepy uncle they keep locked in the cupboard.

The size of his majority last time defied all the forecasts and this year too some of the numbers have appeared wildly exaggerated. The strictures of newspaper deadlines mean I am writing this before the polls have finally closed, so in the event that the result was closer than predicted – I told you so.

There will be many parallels drawn with Tony Blair’s triumph of 1997 but the mood music today is closer to that of 1979, when Margaret Thatcher assumed control of a country many believed was ungovernable: an economic train wreck controlled by trade unions and headed for global irrelevance.

The last few years have demonstrated that the wheel has turned full circle. The difference this time is that UK plc has been rendered unmanageable by incompetence rather than insurgence.

The last government gave us a masterclass in ineptitude – from the misspent millions on personal protection equipment during the pandemic to the stupidness of betting on the election date. So the first job for the new team will be to win back trust, and that’s a big ask given the low expectations of them.

There was a general feeling during the campaign that the party leaders were not the best people for their jobs. Someone actually said it to their faces during a TV debate. And it’s true there are better, brighter and more imaginative individuals out there – but the best people don’t want to be in politics. Why would they? It’s a poisoned chalice. As Johnson learned, you don’t even get the thanks of your own colleagues, let alone anyone else.

Indeed, the negativity of the campaign was enough to put anyone off running for office. In particular the assault on Labour’s Angela Rayner – hounded by shire Tories with moats in their gardens for having the impertinence to have made a small profit selling her council house – was sheer snobbery, an undignified attack on the working classes.

Look, if we could have any prime minister we chose, we’d elect David Attenborough or Carol Vordeman. Even Jeremy Clarkson. But we have to work with what we’ve got.

What the new government has to work with are public services that have lost touch with the public they serve and an infrastructure collapsing under its own weight. It will take more than five years to rebuild all that, especially with so little money in the coffers. But tangible change in those institutions is how we will measure success.

This week’s shot across the bows of the water companies was a start, even though the government had nothing to do with it. How many more corporate casualties will the next five years bring?