This leaves the Conservatives with a diagnosis and then with a choice. The diagnosis is about the reason for the scale of the defeat. The choice is about the conclusions they draw from it.
The party lost because its campaign simply missed the bulk of the electorate. Tory activists are haunted by Europe; the electorate isn't, even though it doesn't think much of it. Asylum is a real issue in parts of the country; but over great stretches of Britain it carries little resonance. The campaign on law and order (as on asylum) appeared intimidatory and at times intolerant. The quarrel on tax seemed marginal in light of the Tory endorsement of Labour's major public spending commitments - though most voters I talked to did expect Labour to increase both taxes and regulation.
William Hague made it clear that those policies stemmed from his own convictions. They have not found wide enough acceptance in the country, and it would be to misread the man to ask him to take the party in a direction with which he was not comfortable. His resignation was therefore inevitable.
The Tories need to bulldoze their way back to the middle ground in order to take advantage of the predictable disillusionment with a Labour second term - especially over public services. I suspect that the biggest mis take they made was to be dazzled in the headlights of Labour's increases in public spending. On the ground the public was strongly aware of shortages of key staff and multiplying bureaucracy affecting education and health. It was frankly sceptical about the ability of money to solve the problems. There is a real market there for the party which can devise a way of delivering value for money and getting efficiency of spend without prescribing a positively Napoleonic mechanism of central control.
This will be a particularly rich vein for opposition if the government is unable to sustain its rate of public spending increase beyond 2004 or if a less benign economic climate makes Gordon Brown's largesse look reckless. The chancellor's homely bride Prudence will sit ill with a live-in mistress, Temptation!
If Labour's new money has not wrought the promised improvement by the time of the next election the public will be more receptive to calls for a radical review of the structures of service delivery. Talk of the Last-Chance Saloon for the NHS has come from Labour, and the government will stand or fall by the test of public spending. The Tories have a better record of innovation in the delivery of public services and they stand to gain if the mood, perhaps prompted by public sector union protest, shifts.
And this opens the way for the Tories to articulate an alternative philosophy to Labour's social democracy. It would be based on the argument for a smaller state, more personal responsibility, more self-reliance. It would take as its starting point the proposition that state-supplied services will always fail expectations, and the mechanism of reform would be overhaul of the tax and benefits system to encourage greater private funding of both health and education. Social democracy has flourished as the predominant form of government in Europe since the fall of communism, and other centre-right parties languish in the same ghetto as the Conservatives. In setting out an intellectually coherent alternative to social democracy, the Conservatives could render service to fellow European parties and build their way back into the mainstream of political innovation.
An alternative to this is, of course, nationalism. And this brings us to Europe. I believe the party should revert to the simple policy of "keep the pound". I would prefer a more pragmatic approach but I am realistic enough to recognise that the confusion and argument that decisions about the euro are likely to provoke within the government will be too inviting to the Conservatives for them to want to blur the target.
The Blair-Brown conflict is the most awaited drama in Westminster and, when the combustible chancellor does get to the end of his tether, the Conservatives will benefit if they have shed the impedimenta that allow them to be accused of wanting simply to get out of Europe. So they should quietly abandon the renegotiation of treaties - a notion which is both incomprehensible and implausible. The vituperative rhetoric about Europe which gave the impression of a mind-set of 1940 embattlement needs to give way to the language of normal political debate.
Developing the concept of the smaller state within the framework of committed internationalism would serve the party far better than either anchoring off-shore from social democracy in the hope of capitalising on discontent with Labour or trumpeting a populist, nationalist message that expresses itself largely in terms of what it is against rather than what it is for.
David Curry was returned as Conservative MP for Skipton and Ripon with an increased majority
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Comment and analysis
George Monbiot: Labour's victory rings hollow
Austen Chamberlain: history's first Hague
