WHO would have thought that as the year draws to a close Boris Johnson would be sitting in Downing Street buttressed by a huge parliamentary majority and with the end of Brexit, or at least its first stage, in sight?

The year began, and this does seem like a long time ago, with Mrs May (remember her?) in Downing Street dependent on the DUP for her parliamentary majority, desperately trying to appease them and right-wing Tory MPs with an ever-harder version of Brexit.

The irony of Mr Johnson’s current ascendancy is that he gained the support of the Brexiteers by essentially betraying them, and the DUP, by rejecting the “undemocratic” Irish backstop that Mrs May had negotiated and instead replacing it with a border down the Irish Sea, something he promised not to do.

This, to all intents and purposes, leaves Northern Ireland still inside the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union.

One result could well be that, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the Government is obliged to mount a constitutional poll with the distinct possibility of Northern Ireland voting to leave the UK and become part of the Irish Republic.

Similarly, another effect of the very hard Brexit that Mr Johnson appears set upon could be to drive the Scots out of the UK into the hands of a welcoming EU. So, ironically, the lasting legacy of this Conservative and Unionist Government might be to bring to an end the 300-year long United Kingdom.

All this is, of course, assuming that we do “Get Brexit Done” about which there is some doubt because, although we will legally leave the EU at the end of next month, Mr Johnson has given himself, and his Government, precious little time to negotiate our new trading relationship.

This negotiation is supposed to take place during the transition period that is due to end on December 31 next year and Mr Johnson says he wants a “Canada-style” free trade deal.

But that deal took seven years to negotiate. We barely have seven months, given that any new agreement deal has to be approved by the European Parliament, 27 member-state parliaments (and a number of regional ones as well) though not by our Parliament here at Westminster.

Should that deadline be missed I suspect that, despite Mr Johnson legislating to make it illegal for the UK Government to seek an extension to the transition period, that is precisely what will happen (what Parliament can do, it can also undo).

So much for the difficulties facing the Tories but these pale into insignificance in comparison with the mountain facing Labour if it ever wants to become the governing party again.

Just in sheer electoral terms it is so far behind the Conservatives in terms of MPs that winning a majority at the next election would take a shift in votes greater than that achieved by either Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.

But Labour is a long way from even thinking about its future electoral strategy. The last election proved to almost everyone, bar a few diehards, that the British people will not vote for a far-left agenda, or at least not in the numbers, or places, required for Labour to win power.

Nor will they vote for a leader who is seen as being so out of touch with the views and aspirations of those voters... particularly in the Midlands and North... that the party needs to reach in order to form a government.

The Labour leadership election is still a number of months away and much can change but at the moment the favourite would appear to be Rebecca Long-Bailey... the candidate favoured by the Corbynites. A host of other runners and riders are entering the fray so prediction is difficult, if not foolhardy. Nonetheless, mine is that if Labour elects Long-Bailey and so is seen to be continuing the Corbynite project, the party’s long-term future as a national political force will be in doubt.

As for the ill-led Liberal Democrats, once again they upped their share of the vote but failed to increase their parliamentary representation. Until the electoral system is changed their hopes of substantial advancement at Westminster are bleak; and there is little chance of that change happening now or in the immediate future, since governments elected by a particular electoral system are hardly going to be keen on abolishing it. As they say “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas”.

Ivor Gaber is Professor of Political Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster-based political correspondent