Political performance.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
--HL Mencken
Labour won in the only sense that counts.
Whatever you need to tell yourself, dude. Call it a "moral victory" or whatever hogwash losers say to console themselves.
The story of the election was definitely in the turnout.
So Starmer and his Labour Party are even more unpopular than blah-blah-blah Scary Corbyn, and the Tories are even less popular than that, roughly on a level with bread mold and diarrhoeia.