Outside of Scotland the number of votes Labour received has not increased since Corbyn, which is actually quite a poor result for Starmer in the circumstances.
So Starmer did not win. The Conservatives lost badly. People did not vote Conservative and that handed a victory by default to Labour. Numbers instead point to votes moving towards Reform UK, the Lib Dems, and the Greens.
Obviously the Guardian is spinning the result.
I suspect this is true to a greater extent in more marginal constituencies and to a lesser extent in less marginal constituencies
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/campaigns/elected-house-...
The other point is that Parliament is not representative of the people: Labour has close to two thirds of the seats but got barely a third of our votes. This sort of thing has happened before, of course, but this is a particularly blatant example.
The spin by Starmer and the Guardian is that they are claiming the people have given Labour an overwhelming mandate, but they really haven't. What they've done is to tell the Tories to eff off, which is very different.
On a related note, Reform UK has got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems and end up with 4 MPs vs 71 for the Lib Dems...
They don't need to do that, due to the flawed system, but it seems likely in most cases.
Previously Labor and Conservative parties plotted against it, along with the newspapers.
Reform have got more votes nationally than the Lib Dems bit get 5 MPs vs 71 for the Lib Dems. Only 34% voted Labour who now have an overwhelming majority. Whatever one might think of this party or that party the outcome of the election is clearly not representative of public opinion.
On the other hand people are every attached to having their MP in their constituency so a level of distortion will remain no matter what but it could be much reduced, indeed.