Why Aren’t the Tories Winning Easily? Because of 2001 and 2005. That’s Why.

In the midst of a piece asking where disillusioned Labour supporters will go – apparently UKIP will be a beneficiary  – John O’Sullivan writes:

That said, the main underlying truth of this campaign — freshened up by this latest development — is that the Tories ought to be winning easily and by a landslide. That is what has happened in other countries where a Left government has collapsed as completely as Labour. Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary has just won more than two-thirds of the popular vote and the right to redraw the country’s post-communist constitution in exactly these circumstances. Orban in fact has just re-fashioned Hungary’s fractious opposition into a broad conservative coalition on the British Tory model by uniting patriotic, free-market, and social conservatives under a single standard — at exactly the moment when the Tories had broken up their own original and successful coalition in pursuit of “progressive” voters with many other places to go.