Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along. The moderate left — here and in the US — insists that tacking to the centre is the way to beat a populist right-winger, despite the fact that Joe Biden won by the skin of his teeth, through the votes of people who couldn’t be arsed to go to the polls on polling day and against a candidate of whom the most charitable description would be ‘fundamentally deranged’.