But the process also delivered more subtle messages that might not easily have become visible without such an election. Labour’s gain came from a meagre increase in voter support from over 32 per cent in 2019 to 34 per cent last Thursday. Britain’s quirky “first-past-the-post” election system allowed Labour to win about 64 per cent of the seats in parliament on the back of 34 per cent of the votes.

Just as the Labour Party benefited from the quirks of the election system, other parties were spectacularly affected. The UK’s Green Party won 7 per cent of the vote – about a fifth of the vote share won by Labour – albeit just four seats.

The warning to the Conservative Party was clear: the civil war fought for the past decade within the party over Brexit and immigration is nowhere near resolved, and it may be unable to recover power until this critical intraparty war is settled.

The Labour Party should also beware: the right-leaning Conservative Party and Reform UK together won 38 per cent of the vote, a larger share than the Labour Party’s 34 per cent. Had Farage’s party decided not to compete in the election, Labour would probably not have won. Starmer has a long way to go before he wins the majority of voters’ hearts, even if for now he has managed to capture an astonishing number of seats in Britain’s parliament.

The other striking democratic quirk in the UK election sits with the centrist Liberal Democratic Party. Its share of the vote nudged marginally up to 12 per cent from 11.5 per cent in 2019, but that half-per cent increase boosted seats won from a meagre 11 in 2019, to a stunning 72 today. A combination of a massive nationwide vote-split between the Conservatives and Reform, and careful tactical targeting of marginal constituencies, enabled the Liberal Democrats to convert themselves from inconsequential outsiders to the third-largest voting bloc, with the potential to exert significant influence on power in the next five years.

Not only do such elections provide a unique way of speaking truth to power, but they can provide leaders with sensitive signals that can help them avoid policy errors and attune policy priorities to shifting public opinion. A clear warning to our own administration is that in the absence of such warning signals, leaders still need to find effective ways of sounding out – and being responsive to – public concerns.

The UK election results in particular provide a resounding reminder of the need for modesty in public office, with Starmer declaring Britain had “voted decisively for change, for national renewal and a return of politics to public service”.

Their reminder is that, whether a democracy or not, and whatever the quirky kind of democracy we live with, good governance is not guaranteed. Autocracies can be bad, but so can democracies. Often it is not the political architecture that determines good governance, but the integrity of the people that govern.

National elections offer a clear and simple way of publicly auditing the quality of governance. In the absence of elections, that audit is still needed.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific