If Tories find some comfort in getting into three figures in the exit poll, they are kidding themselves.
Not only are the Tories on course to record a significantly lower number of seats than it won at its modern nadir of 1997, but it has lost its parliamentary monopoly over right-of-centre opinion too.
Yes, it looks like there will be sufficient Conservative MPs to put together a workable shadow cabinet and frontbench. Yes, it will be a Tory who leads the interrogations of Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs rather than bungee-jumping Sir Ed Davey.
But Nigel Farage must be presumed to be home and hosed in Clacton, and to be taking at least a handful of fellow Reformers into the Commons given the forecast of 13 seats for his latest insurgency.
Farage has for now completely captured the once totemic Tory issue of immigration control
He has for now completely captured the once totemic Tory issue of immigration control, made a big grab for the mantle of Britain’s chief tax-cutting champion and placed himself in the vanguard of a growing movement prepared to resist the dash to carbon net zero too.
With the legitimacy and platform a seat in parliament and a parliamentary party will give him – not to mention a small fortune in Short Money to fund a working professional party structure – his tail will be up.
If the Conservatives do not put their all into covering their right flank over the next year then they will lose more voters to the Farage insurgency. And their chances of successfully defending high watermark county council seats next spring will be negligible.
Why might they not bolster their right side? Simply because the ‘One Nation’ wing of the party may well seek to argue that the Tories lost so badly in many of their traditional ‘blue wall’ strongholds in the South East and South West owing to them pushing an excessively right-wing agenda.
If the primary Tory mission gets defined as winning back leafy commuter belt seats lost to the Lib Dems then Farage will be staring at an open goal.
The policy mix the Conservatives will pursue in opposition depends to a great extent on who emerges triumphant from their imminent next leadership election (‘not another one’). That will in turn depend on which two candidates get presented to the party membership. It is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that MPs on the left of the party will keep a full-blooded right-winger off the ballot.
Were, for instance, Tom Tugendhat to emerge victorious from the leadership contest then there is every chance of the new Lib Dem MPs in the blue wall serving one term only. But in hundreds of other seats, the meaningful contest at the next general election would then be Labour versus Reform.
Under a Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman or Robert Jenrick and with a far more punchy immigration-sceptic agenda the party may be able to fend off Farage outside the south. But that may go down like a lead balloon with socially liberal blue wall voters.
At the last general election, the Tories were celebrating having become beneficiaries of a remarkable political realignment. Now they find they cannot ride two horses that are pulling in sharply different directions. Which way they decide to jump will be crucial.
As they stare alternately at Farage to their right and Davey to their left, they will need to answer the Dirty Harry question: Do we feel lucky?
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