But answer this honestly, closing your eyes to hindsight. If I'd floated two hypothetical occurrences a month ago - a senior politician thumps a voter, a cancer victim's partner eyeballs the prime minister on the failure of the NHS - what outcome would we all have predicted? Resignations, reduced majorities, even a change of government? But nothing. All the interviews, columns, walkabouts, phone-ins, have scarcely changed a mind. It's often said that election campaigns are the World Cups of political journalism. But, if so, the last two tournaments have consisted entirely of goalless draws.
From this, it follows that the biggest winners in the campaign have been opinion pollsters. All politicians and all pundits said they couldn't be right. It simply wasn't possible that the Tories could have made no advance since 1997. But they were correct and we must grudgingly salute them while regretting their undoubted role in depressing the turnout.
It might seem odd to mention next that a prime minister who has achieved the biggest second term majority in history is one of the night's winners but institutional hostility to politicians and focus on the low turnout are at risk of combining to talk down the scale of Tony Blair's personal achievement. Even at our most cynical, we should acknowledge that what Blair has done is historically astonishing: like his political model, Bill Clinton, he made the re-election of a centre left party seem tediously inevitable only years after it had seemed unelectable.
And an important lesson for the Tories is to remember the now obscured fact that the Labour party didn't want Blair to lead it into the 1997 election. Its choice was John Smith. Who really believes that Mr Smith would have delivered two humiliations of the Tory party? Only a medical catastrophe forced the Labour party to choose the man who has rewritten political history.
While contemplating an equivalent leap of faith, Conservatives should chant in their heads the key word in the political lexicon of the young Tony Blair. It was "baggage". Privately, he always attributed Neil Kinnock's defeats in '87 and '92 to the fact that, however much Kinnock remodelled himself and his policies, the voters saw the red flag and the socialist rhetoric he had now disowned. The Labour plane finally took off when Blair was able to throw all the voter-disgruntling luggage out of the hold.
A key mistake in Hague's campaign was the prominent role given to Baroness Thatcher. She secured the core Tory vote of 32%, but, for the wider electorate, tied Hague to a rejected past. And yet the current front-runners to replace Hague - Michael Portillo and Ann Widdecombe - are both closely associated with the old bag, er, I mean baggage.
Portillo and Widdecombe also bring another problem. The word "normality" is in most circumstances a dangerous one, but the Conservatives need to reflect on it. Blair was criticised by some for describing Hague as "weird", but this judgment showed his sophisticated understanding of the electorate. Hague is a man of real intelligence and wit but something about him - his looks, that adolescence reading Hansard - irresistibly hints at a mother planet other than Earth. In that context, it should be noted that the main prospective Tory leaders are a middle-aged single woman who boasts of being a virgin and a married man who has admitted to bisexuality. It's questionable whether either history helps you to connect with the emotional mainstream in the way that electorates still seem to ask of leaders.
American political pundits talk about the barbecue test. They argue that - in elections which take place during peacetime prosperity - those people who bother to vote are essentially asking the question: which of them could I share a steak and beer with? In Britain, the equivalent would be the pub/dinner party test. For all Blair's occasional peculiarities of tone, he and Kennedy win this challenge easily over Hague.
Among the Conservative survivors, the barbecue test gives you Kenneth Clarke, who was showing intriguing signs on election night of a new diet, suit and haircut. The obvious obstacle is that the Eurosceptic half of the Tory party would only invite Clarke to a barbecue at which he was tied to a spit and rotating over the charcoal.
But the big winners were all people who defeated the conventional wisdom in politics. Blair's second landslide, the hospital doctor's independent victory in Wyre Forest, John Prescott's triumphant survival of thumping a voter, and the BNP's horrifying popularity in the north all defied the laws of punditry. The lesson to the Conservatives is that they need to surprise people.
Useful links
Results
Ask Aristotle about your constituency
Talk about it
Who should lead the Tories? Should Hague have quit?
Video
See Hague make his resignation statement
Election headlines
Triumphant Blair reshuffles cabinet
Hague: I quit
Comment and analysis
George Monbiot: Labour's victory rings hollow
Austen Chamberlain: history's first Hague
