The Conservatives’ real problem? It’s that the electorate now sees them as reckless

The opposition wants to raze your house to the ground. No, bear with me. Analogy. They say they’ll pull it down, and build a new one with, I don’t know, walls of gold, and hot and cold running unicorns. ‘You can’t trust them,’ says the government, ‘because they want to knock your house down!’ And normally, normally, this would be quite an effective message. Only this time it is delivered from inside the cab of a JCB by a government that also wants to knock down your house, and has already demolished your garden wall.

‘Honk honk!’ they’re going, on that pull-down-horn thing, with eyes gleaming like those of actual maniacs. ‘Those guys are crazy!’ they’re saying, with foam frothing from their own lips. ‘They’ll make you poorer!’ they’ll say, as the caterpillar tracks crunch over your bird table and garden gnome. And all the while, they genuinely do not understand why their message of stability is not getting across.

They don’t get it. A week after an election which saw the Conservative majority recede like an alarmed turtle’s head, they are not even close to getting it. They think, I think, that it was all to do with Jeremy Corbyn being unexpectedly charming, or Theresa May being unexpectedly like a malfunctioning android, or Nick Timothy accidentally greenlighting a manifesto with an actual policy in it. Whereas, truthfully, the Tories’ real problem was that they went into this election entirely bereft of their usual Unique Selling Point. The Conservatives were not conservative. They were not a safe pair of hands. That normal vibe the Tories exude of ‘you don’t need to love us, but at least we can hold stuff together’ was missing the entire last part.