The Trots will go too far and the troubled Tories are stronger than they look

The transformation in Tory fortunes is astonishing. Think back to the eve of the election campaign. Across the Channel, M. Macron was still far from established. His private life aroused more interest than his policies. It was noted that there appeared to be no French word for “toyboy.” Perhaps there now was: “un macron.” Like Mrs May, he had been lucky, benefiting from the implosion of formidable rivals. Unlike her, he did not have a party to sustain him. So even if he defeated Marine le Pen, how would he be able to reform the sclerotic French state, when he would be facing a hostile Assemblee Nationale?

Recent French Presidents have resembled the Monarchs who ruled between Henri II and Henri Quatre: a succession of puffed-up mediocrities whose reigns ended in failure. There seemed no reason to believe that President Macron would be different. Yet now, they are comparing him to the Petit Caporal. The truth is likely to lie somewhere between Napoleon and the last Valois Kings: we shall see. For the new man in the Elysee, it is still glad confident morning.

Downing Street is another story. But when Theresa May called the Election, there were only two reactions. The Tories generally applauded her ruthless cynicism because they assumed that she would win. Her opponents usually deplored it because they assumed that they would lose. That said, some Labour MPS – mainly with safe-ish seats – were covertly in favour of an election: it might provide a way of dumping Mr Corbyn. No-one actually thought that the Tories were in any danger.

The only risk appeared to arise from complacency. Voters do not like large majorities. A succession of polls predicting such an outcome would have been unhelpful, and anyway, Tories did not need encouragement from the polls. They generally assumed that anything under a hundred would be a disappointment – but gloating could wait until the ballots closed. What a different mood now. If the Grenfell Tower fire had occurred on the Monday before the Election, Jeremy Corbyn would probably be Prime Minister.

So what went wrong? There is a short answer: everything. The campaign was wretched. Because Mr Corbyn seemed so hopeless, everyone forgot one of Gordon Reece’s dicta. The late Gordon, a PR man for Margaret Thatcher who actually understood the public, always said that when they are watching a politician on television, real people do not listen to the detailed arguments. But they do ask themselves a vital question: Is this a nice person or a nasty person who has come into my living room. If the answer is “nasty person” then it does not matter if you could claim to have won the argument in the small print. You have lost.

Mrs May lost. She came across as chilly. That might not have been so bad if she had also come across as formidable. She did not. Nor, surely, did Mr Corbyn. But he had never set out to major on formidable. He projected himself as decent, likeable and sincere. There was also the underdog factor – something else that I got wrong. Early on in the campaign, a friend asked whether I was worried by a sympathy vote for Corbyn the underdog. “If Jeremy Corbyn were a dog” said I: “the RSPCA would be prosecuting his owners, for failing to have him put down when he is in such obvious distress.” That fully merits the smart-ass prize.

There may have been a further and related factor. The Tories tried to portray Jeremy Corbyn as sinister. That was hard, because it is so clearly untrue. Although he may have all manner of daft beliefs, he would be hopeless at putting them into practice (John McDonnell would be another matter). Mr Corbyn as an active revolutionary would make Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes. A number of friends who are Tory MPs had the same experience on the doorstep. They would go into the standard Central Office denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn. “But Jeremy Corbyn is a nice man.” “No he isn’t. What about the IRA?” The Tories could see that it was not working.

While that was happening, a lot of voters did not warm to Theresa May. They did not like the relentlessly negative tone of the campaign. They assumed that she was going to win and had no interest in voting to give her a big majority. So they stayed at home, unlike the young Corbynistas, who used social media to whip each other up. A friend of mine in a solid Conservative seat saw his majority fall by 1000 while turnout went up by 500. He is certain that he lost hardly any Tory voters to Labour, and that makes sense: nationally, the Tory vote increased. But in that unthreatened seat, unenthused Tories thought that it was safe for them to stay at home.

These election results need careful reflection. But there may be one interesting conclusion. Up to now, it has been assumed that the current boudaries are unfair to the Tories, which is why the other parties are so keen to block the proposed revision. Yet this time, the Tories got 2.4% more votes that Labour. and over 20% more seats. Everyone assumes that it will now be impossible to have the boundary changes implemented. If so, that might not be bad news for the Tories.

But before they worry about the minutiae of seats, the Tories must tackle a bigger task. Underlying Mrs May’s weakness, there was a serious strategic misjudgment. What was the Tories’ economic message? You cannot remember. Exactly. For a party to go into an election without a strong economic message is the equivalent of going into a rugger match without a scrum.

That is especially true for the Tories. Despite the best efforts of successive leaders from John Major onwards, the Tories’ opponents still seem able to portray them as the party of the rich. There is only one way to counter that. Forget about failing to defend free enterprise and replicating the tepid enthusiasm for business in Mrs May’s manifesto. That would be intellectually bankrupt, morally contemptible and electorally suicidal. Instead, the Tories should be the party of hope and aspiration. Anyone who wants to get on in life or has ambitions for their children should be told, over and over again, that the Tories are the party for them: the only party for them. It should not be impossible to project that message, for one good reason. It happens to be true.

David Cameron recognised this, but had a problem. He was convinced that words would not be enough. Before they would be open to rhetorical persuasion, the voters would need to feel better off. That was hard. In the valley of the shadow of the great recession, the economy was refusing to grow. It may be that Mr Cameron spent too much energy on social modernisation and not enough on the sunlit uplands, but he felt that before the voters would listen, they would actually want to see the sun gleaming on the cornfields while the farmer was chasing naughty little Theresa.

Even so, there has been a further difficulty. Suddenly, the word “austerity” has entered daily political vocabulary. To that, there is only one response. What austerity? The debate is generally conducted in billions and even trillions: figures that mean nothing to the average voter – politicians’ figures, which can therefore be dismissed as irrelevant: perhaps even as untrue. Successive Tory leaders should have done far more to use real people’s arithmetic. The government is spending over £13,000 a year on every man, woman and child in the country: over £50,000 a year on a family of four. That ought to be enough, surely, to pay for policemen, soldiers, teachers, doctors, hospitals – and safe tower blocks. To finance this, the Government is borrowing over £100,000 a minute. Does that sound like austerity?

That said, it would also be useful to set out the expenditure figure in full: noughts, not mere billions. It is £800,000,000,000 – which looks like a freight train on the horizon. This should help to put austerity into perspective.

Not that everyone would listen. Every now and again, political conflict is dramatised to the extent that some partisans lose contact with rationality and behave like the votaries of an extreme religious cult. Thus it was in Paris, during the evenements of 1968. It was also true in Scotland, when the nationalist tide was roaring in and today it is happening in staid old England. But all these outbreaks of fanaticism have one point in common. They are brief. In politics, no intense emotion is prolonged: no prolonged emotion is intense (this is not necessarily true when politics and religion fuse, as in parts of the Islamic world).

England could be in for a tense summer. The Trots are out to make trouble. They will attempt to convince the inflammable young that this government is not only illegitimate. It is murderous. The Socialist Workers’ (sic) Party is adept at exploiting grievances. But they are equally good at going too far. They have convinced themselves that Britain is ripe for a Bolshevik coup. If everyone stays calm, it should be easy to refute that rubbish.

Between domestic discontent and the Brexit talks, we have to live in excessively interesting times. The PM has no choice. Her duty is to steady the ship before addressing her own future.  Her party and the country need a respite from political excitement, even if it is likely to be brief. Above all, Tories should remember that they are in a stronger position than they appeared to be in early 1958: than they were from late 1992 until at least 2001. To paraphrase Gladstone, the resources of Toryism are not exhausted.