Tory projection therapy...

It must be a frustrating thing, being a Conservative. Between 1997 and 2010, you were consigned to thirteen long years in the doldrums of opposition, after the internal ructions, divisions, and scandals of John Major’s dying half decade in No. 10. Expelled from Scotland, drubbed in Wales, knocked out of contention in great swathes of England north of the Wash, during these stale decades, you have seen your core support grey and die off, and won few new friends in the intervening years. 

While there have been bright spots and incidental victories during the rotting of Gordon Brown’s trouble-prone, listless and disloyal government, even facing down a Prime Minister sagging under the weight of his demons and his personal unpopularity, even then, featherweights Cameron and Osborne still could not win their majority. Votaries may continue to be laid at the Thatcherite shrine, but the Iron Lady’s electoral success continues to elude her true blue heirs and successors. Today, Cameron would give his eye teeth for Major’s 1992 numbers, taking 336 seats to Kinnock’s 271. Even the most optimistic polling current projections put the Conservatives short of the 326 required for a working majority. 

And while the destruction of the Liberal Democrats may bring a glad twinkle to the Tory eye, without Nick Clegg’s support, the party is without viable friends and allies. Comrades of the past, the Ulster Unionists, have had their own substance devoured by the DUP. The Greens, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru, will not touch David Cameron’s party with a bargepole.

UKIP is the viper nestled in the Tories’ own bosom, laid by the Thatcherite indictment of the European Union, and incubated by the divisive years of internal conflict between "the bastards" and John Major. While prominent party figures have attempted publicly to repent of their past backwardness, racism, villainy, and social illiberalism, even broadly sympathetic fellow travellers like Hugo Rifkind maintain that the nasty party has not "modernised", to shed its habits of mind, and skin. 

Frustration in response to these setbacks and failures is an understandable reaction, but the Tory party and its cheerleaders in the media seem incapable of self analysis. In the Daily Mail, Max Hastings inveighs against the "Stalinist" SNP.  Nicola, he suggests, is "red in tooth and claw", and that "the terrifying prospect of the Scots ruling England is all too real." Conveniently absent from his tirade is any recognition that English MPs constitute a whopping 86% of the House of Commons. 

If Hastings’ beloved band of reactionaries, bigots, merchant adventurers, and conscienceless asset strippers cannot command the support to form a majority government, that is not attributable to "Scots ruling England", but to the failure of the Conservative Party to convince more than a third of the English electorate to support them. Notice that Hastings, slyly and with deftness, associates "England" with Tory successes.

It may be helpful to remember than in the 2010 election, the party won only 39.6% of the vote in English constituencies and 298 of the 533 seats contested. If the current polling is to be believed, David Cameron will have to be content with an even smaller share of the vote in May. Forgive me if I fail to regard that as a decisive mandate and an injustice to the Plain People of England for the Nats to have any say in the future direction of the United Kingdom.

Instead of engaging in self analysis of the failures of the once dominant Conservative party, the neurotic British right always find a convenient sacrificial victim for the wicker man, be it a Lib Dem MP refusing to vote for some madcap Tory scheme, or European politician or bureaucrat or judge, who prevents the mandateless, majorityless Conservative party from swaggering around like a party with a thumping endorsement from the whole people of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

If you want an explanation for that missing majority, Mr Hastings, look to yourself and to your fellow travellers. It is tempting to see these victim fantasies and outbursts in terms of Freudian transference. Addressing the underlying source of frustration is too tricky -- a scapegoat relieves the frustration, but leaves the underlying source of anxiety unaddressed. For the grousing Tory, bereft at the idea that a majority if beyond them, it is always someone else’s fault, and the nasty party is always being hard done by. So much for the Tory tradition of taking responsibility for your actions...