I don’t know if it’s just the extent to which Conservative activists were gaslit by the polling and CCHQ’s abject campaign, but the mood among those I spoke to as the night progressed was oddly chipper, given the Tory party was set to receive the worst result in its long history.
But when it looked at one point as though it might return fewer than 70 seats, and there seemed to be the faint possibility of Sir Ed Davey as leader of the opposition, the 1997 result minus 20 or so seats suddenly didn’t look so bad.
In the short run, that psychology is welcome: it makes the odds of a complete meltdown, and a shotgun marriage with Reform UK, much less likely. The important thing is that it doesn’t run over into complacency – this is still a horrific result, and the Conservatives’ internal reckoning must face up to the scale of the disaster.
The question now is who is going to oversee that reckoning? For as Labour ministers get their feet under their desks and begin the act of being performatively shocked by the real state of the books, the Conservatives are about to plunge into a leadership contest.
Voters have already winnowed the field: Grant Shapps, always an outside bet, is out in Welwyn Hatfield. More significantly, Penny Mordaunt lost a close-fought race in Portsmouth North. That means the Tory left, never the most potent force in these contests, has lost its most plausible champion.
Yet the hard right hasn’t had a good campaign either. Suella Braverman won in Fareham and Waterlooville, and will certainly be a contender in the contest to come. But while Reform UK won a lot of votes, its failure to deliver on the promise of the exit poll will undermine any push for an immediate deal.
At one point, whether or not to reach an accommodation with Farage looked set to be the defining split of the race. But after six weeks of thoroughly toxifying their brand, the other candidates are all playing down the idea of a deal with Reform UK.
Moreover, Reform’s electoral map may militate against any enthusiasm for such talks on the other side. With a strong batch of second-place finishes in Labour seats where the Tories were nowhere, Farage et al may see no reason to link their brand to that of the Conservatives.
So what will the dividing lines be? It depends in part on the timeline of the campaign. An immediate race would probably see each faction fall back on their favoured fairytales: it was all about Brexit, or Boris, or Truss, or the Blob, etc etc.
A longer contest would almost certainly be a more interesting one, giving the candidates the opportunity – not that all of them would take it – to attempt a proper intellectual reckoning with the sheer scale of the failure that produced this result. It would allow them to try to formulate a coherent Conservative diagnosis for the many ailments of 21st-century Britain.
Even if they don’t manage that, the cannier ones may at least have more space to start thinking tactically. A full-on factional blame game, in which every side blames the others for all that has gone wrong, would be emotionally satisfying but deeply counterproductive.
The wiser candidates must realise that their party is a broad church – especially when it’s actually winning elections – and start thinking about the ways in which the competing demands of the party’s various groupings might fit together.
None of them will get everything they want (and the sooner the purists realise that, the better). But the candidate who can offer most of them something – ideally something that fits into a realistic programme – will have a head start on the long, rocky road back to office.
Of course, over the next few years, the Tories will be a sideshow. But even at this nadir, they will still be worth paying attention to, for one simple reason: they remain this country’s main centre-right party and, at present, are almost certainly going to be the kernel of whatever government eventually replaces Labour.
As such, the next leader, and the decisions they make, could really matter. They will shape the future of the party, especially on candidate selections. David Cameron and George Osborne first entered the Commons in 2001, Michael Gove in 2005 – the Tory class of 2029 may well be the ministers of the day after tomorrow.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
Guardian Newsroom: Election results special
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