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He wants a little more time and he may just get it. It seems there was enough in the results of Thursday’s elections to allow Keir Starmer to fend off calls for his immediate exit. But that should not obscure the bigger picture, which is not only disastrous for Labour but also has alarming implications for British politics – and even the future of the country.

Start with the prime minister, whose fate was once deemed to hang on these contests. Maybe the political operation at Downing Street has got better, but on Friday morning it appeared that No 10 had benefited from the management of expectations. Labour MPs had been braced for losing as many as 2,000 council seats in England, with 1,500 seen as the threshold for a leadership challenge. But the first analyses pointed to an eventual tally of losses short of that first number, at least. In other words, the results were bad, but not that bad – and therefore good enough for the PM.

Privately, even Starmer’s most loyal allies do not make the case for him fighting the next general election. For now, their demand is more modest. Give him another year; let him see if he can turn things around. These results offered one small, tactical boost to that argument. Defeats to Reform in the likes of Tameside and Wigan, the back yard of Starmer’s most obvious challenger, the Greater Manchester metro mayor, Andy Burnham, are a reminder that there is no guarantee that Burnham could even become an MP, let alone PM. What Labour seat is so safe that Burnham would be sure to win a byelection, even if a sitting MP chose to stand down to make way for him?

In case that doesn’t scare off those minded to demand a change at the top, Team Starmer has a few more arrows in its quiver. Look, they say, at how voters responded to the clown show that the Tory party became when it turned regicide into a habit. The electorate will not tolerate a repeat performance from Labour. Besides, say those in the PM’s camp, if the party were to topple Starmer, the demand for a fresh general election would be deafening, amplified by a hostile press that was prepared to accept a change at the top when the Tories did it but will not allow Labour the same latitude. For those Labour MPs considering rolling the dice, the No 10 response will be: do you feel lucky?

If those arguments prevail and Starmer is granted a stay of execution, that’s all it will be. The Labour tribe know how unpopular their leader is, even if they struggle fully to understand it. Starmer inspires a loathing on the doorstep that surprised many canvassers these past few weeks. Even his critics concede that his record-breaking unpopularity seems out of proportion to anything he has actually done. Sure, he’s an awful communicator who has made some dire decisions – from the restriction of the winter fuel allowance to the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US – but, as one Labour figure put it to me, it’s not like he has started an illegal war or crashed the economy. And yet he’s reviled as much as late-stage Tony Blair or Liz Truss.

So Starmer’s friends know that, if he is granted it, this will be his last chance. They know, too, that he will have to reset his premiership and that small adjustments, or a mini-reshuffle, won’t cut it. He is set to make what is billed as a major speech on Monday, and it better had be. For what it’s worth, my view has long been that one move he has to make is towards Europe: to tell the country that the world has changed beyond recognition since 2016, that Brexit has proved to be a great and costly error, and that it’s time to repair the damage.

His case would be that such a shift is urgent, for the sake of our economy and for our safety, to stand with our neighbours in a world made more dangerous by Donald Trump. That’s the right strategy for the country, but it also makes political sense: polling data shows that, with the exception of a dwindling number of Labour leavers, undoing Brexit is one of the few issues on which most of Labour’s loose coalition of voters, now fragmenting so dramatically, can agree.

If it were up to me, this move would be strikingly big. Not just tinkering around with phytosanitary standards and the like, but a promise to rejoin the customs union or even the single market. It has to be big to match the scale of the moment – and because the hole Labour is in is now so deep.

That is the big picture that risks being missed while Labour consoles itself that, say, it held off the Greens in a few London boroughs. At the centre of that picture has to be Wales, where Labour has been in first place in every electoral contest since 1922 – until now. It has been crushed there, reduced to a handful of seats. Alongside it should be Scotland, where Labour long ago reconciled itself to losing out yet again to a Scottish National party that has held power for 19 straight years.

Taken together, if these results have a face, it is the gurning grin of Nigel Farage. Look at the map of Britain, not just at those Reform wins across England: whatever the final tallies, that the party was able to compete for first place in Wales and second place in Scotland should be a profound shock.

For Labour, there is a risk of drawing the wrong conclusion, deciding that because the party lost seats to Reform, it must now turn (further) right. That rests on the mistaken assumption that Labour supporters are simply defecting to Farage, when, in fact, those losses come about because the left/centre-left vote is split, with Labour haemorrhaging support to the Greens, Liberal Democrats and others, thereby allowing Reform to come through the middle and win. As Prof Rob Ford noted, Labour might be losing many seats to Reform, but it’s losing votes more to the Greens – and that’s a problem that requires a different solution.

Still, consider what Reform’s success means not for Labour, but the country. It tells us that Britain is no more immune to the virus of nationalist populism than anywhere else. Despite Farage’s closeness to Trump; despite what should be the national scandal of the undisclosed £5m gift Farage took from a crypto billionaire shortly before announcing his 2024 general election candidacy; despite the epic failure of his signature mission, Brexit, Farage and Reform are still capable of winning everywhere. Whatever their differences, preventing Farage becoming Britain’s next prime minister is now, surely, the central task of the country’s progressive parties.

But the challenge does not end there. The old duopoly is dying before our eyes: these were bad results for the Conservatives as well as Labour. We are now in the era of seven-party politics, saddled with an electoral system designed for no such thing. More importantly, three of the four nations that make up the UK are set to be led by first ministers committed to the eventual breakup of the UK. For what we used to call the main UK parties, finding a single programme that can appeal across such a fragmented union is looking like an impossible task.

More than 50 years ago, the question of the age was: who governs Britain? In our own time, the question may soon be: is Britain becoming ungovernable?

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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