On Thursday I voted Conservative in a general election for the first time, something I always said I would never do.

As a naïve teenager in 1997 I voted Labour and helped Tony Blair achieve his historic landslide victory. Yesterday I helped Boris Johnson achieve a different historic landslide victory of his own.

I joined the Conservatives a year ago on the strength of the local party and despite Theresa May and her treasonous behaviour. The local elections this year saw Labour take a lot of seats off the Conservatives in a campaign that consisted entirely of making promises to save the local A&E from closure that they had no way of keeping. They tried the same again with the general election but voters saw through it this time and rejected their politics of fear.

My own constituency of Telford went from a marginal seat with a precarious 740 vote majority for the Conservative MP, Lucy Allen, to being a Tory safe seat with a healthy majority of 10,941. All over England and Wales, traditional Labour voting constituencies turned blue. Seats that would normally vote Labour if they pinned a red rosette on a donkey returned Conservative MPs and the so-called “red wall” of Labour safe seats across the Midlands and north of England turned out to be more of a red curtain.

With the huge majority the Conservatives have we will now be leaving the EU at last. Boris’ deal is terrible but once we leave there’s no going back and our relationship with the EU can be changed in future.

Not everyone is happy with the result of course. The far left Socialist Worker’s Party had an anti-democracy protest planned in advance. Violent masked thugs took to the streets in London last night, attacking police and demanding the result of the election be ignored.