Victory will prove a humiliating experience for Tony Blair

Next Thursday Tony Blair will be re-elected with a fairly generous margin of victory: not less than a 50-seat majority, but probably not much more than 100. The Tories will make some progress, but not much. Anything more than 200 seats after 5 May, and Central Office should open a small case of champagne.

This comparative failure is by no means a matter for despair. The Conservatives have fought a sound campaign. The personal performance of Michael Howard is beyond praise. He has shown stamina, resilience and guts. Twice he has faced desperate situations, once when he took over the Tory leadership in late 2003, then again in November last year, when everything seemed on the verge of collapse. Each time he fought back.

Howard has imposed discipline and made no sloppy errors. He is a seasoned politician and a serious man. When he became leader, the Conservatives were facing collapse in the polls. There was a genuine chance they could be overtaken by the Liberal Democrats and sink back into third-party irrelevance. The fact that this is no longer the case is mainly down to Michael Howard, though Charles Kennedy also deserves his share of the credit.

So many senior Conservatives — Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo are the two most important examples, but there are dozens of other cases — were happy to serve in government, then showed no relish for opposition after 1997. The abiding glory of Michael Howard, and the reason that he will always have a place of great honour in the history of the Conservative party, is that he has not shied away from the sweaty, dreary business of opposition. The true test of the mettle of any human being is not how they handle success.