A 15-year-old boy is facing life in prison after being found guilty of murdering another teenager outside the gates of his school. Quamari Serunkuma-Barnes, 15, was chased and stabbed three times by his attacker, who cannot be named for legal reasons, outside Capital City Academy on 23 January.

When the clock struck 10 last Thursday night, there was a moment of collective disorientation. With each tolling of the bell, the solid political ground we had been standing on was shaken by tectonic shifts below. On television, the anchors sounded unconvinced by the news they were announcing: according to the exit poll, the Tories had lost their majority and Labour had gained seats. “Boy, oh boy, oh boy,” David Dimbleby said on the BBC, “are we going to be hung, drawn and quartered if this is all wrong!”

This is the tale of two Harrows. The first is the story I went to cover in Harrow West, which was Labour’s 19th most vulnerable seat. Working on the assumption of a predatory Tory takeover, Harrow West seemed ripe for the picking: Labour won it in 1997 for the first time and clung on to it – its 2015 majority was just 2,208.

Hope, when given the encouragement and the space, can be a force more potent than despair. The leap of faith that it demands, in imagining a future that does not yet exist, leaves it prone to the disparagement of cynics. To act on that faith, to take that leap, necessitates risk. And inherent in all risk is the possibility of failure.

On the face of it, Wells is straightforward: a two-horse race between the Tories, defending the seat, and the Liberal Democrats, who must win in places like this if they are to become a credible political force again.

“Vote for me, because I don’t even want to go to college, and I don’t care, and as president I won’t do anything. Or don’t vote for me! Who cares? Don’t vote at all!” says Tammy Metzler in Alexander Payne’s Election. Tammy is only running for high school president because the girl she is in love with has run off with her dumb jock brother, Paul. Tammy’s thwarted desire and its consequences are but one glorious strand in this black comedy. This is about a school election, morality, corruption, self-deception and venality. In other words, all politics. It is a movie about the weakness of men when faced with ambitious women, or really any woman at all.

Some statistics you just cannot get out of your head. The fact that eight American kids every day are shot dead is one of them. When I was first told that, back in 2007, I’d lived in the US for four years. I’d just had a kid. I thought I was pretty much across most of the counter-narrative to the country’s official apple-pie story. But this is one of those facts that, once known, can’t be forgotten. It colours everything.

At a drinks party in central London, not long after Jeremy Corbyn had been elected leader of the Labour party first time round, a young journalist talked me through the facts as she saw them.

Fartun Osman is in a tight spot. She, her husband and their four children, aged seven, five, three and one, live in a private one-bedroom flat in Harrow. Her eldest daughter suffers from asthma and eczema. “She has a lot of allergies,” says Osman. “Sometimes she can’t sleep. Sometimes she can’t do anything.”