The Tories have triumphed in Newark. Can they do the same in a national campaign?

The Tories now have a great deal of confidence after Newark. It’s not just, as George Osborne said on the Today programme this morning, that ‘this all shows that if you’ve got a plan that is working for the country and you’ve got a good local candidate, as we did in Robert Jenrick, people respond to that’. It’s also that the party managed to run a very slick and energetic campaign.