Can Nigel Farage take the Tories to victory?

Despite the consistent poll lead and projections of a majority of about 40 seats, the Tories are still nervous. They are nervous because they are uncertain, because their route to victory involves taking seats that the Tories haven’t won in living memory, so no one has a proper sense of how well (or otherwise) it’s going.

The debacle of the last general election campaign has left the Tory party with a collective fear of terra incognita. At the start of that campaign, there was talk of the Conservatives sweeping through the Labour heartlands, but instead they had a lesson in how badly campaigns can go wrong. The Labour vote is resilient, and there is scepticism even among the cabinet about some of the places that the Tories are trying to take this time. ‘Only a certain number of target seats are realistic,’ warns one secretary of state.

Worse, the Tories now have no safety net. In 2010, the stubborn loyalty of Labour voters meant David Cameron fell short of a majority — but he still made it into government thanks to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. In 2017, the Tories lost their 2015 majority but could still govern thanks to a deal with the DUP. But if the Tories don’t win outright this time, they’re gone. Isaac Levido, the Australian drafted in to run the Tory campaign, likes to tell colleagues that the Tories have a path to victory but it is ‘steep and narrow’.

By acting as if a second independence referendum has already been called, Nicola Sturgeon is helping the Tories

On the upside, in the last few days this path has broadened out. When parliament finally voted on 29 October for an election, the Tories were still fearful of what would happen come Halloween. They were concerned about a backlash to the Prime Minister’s failure to deliver on his ‘do or die’ pledge to take Britain out of the EU on 31 October.