Hope always springs eternal in politics, yet even the most Pollyanna-ish of Tory party loyalists must by now be in a state of despair.
As if things were not already bad enough, their man keeps on making mistakes – not least, as is now obvious, in the original miscalculation of calling an election earlier than he needed to.
These errors of judgment, however, are just the last-gasp manifestations of a much bigger problem.
As has similarly occurred in Australia and Canada, the centre-Right in British politics has erupted into existential civil war. Rather than making common cause to fight the Left, it is instead steadily consuming itself.
It’s not that there is any great appetite for the blandness of Sir Keir Starmer’s “change through stability” message. It’s just that it is up against a hopelessly divided alternative that repeatedly seems only to confirm the Starmer narrative of destructive chaos.
If we add together poll ratings for the Conservatives and for Reform UK, we get to a number which is within spitting distance of Starmer’s Labour, with some possibility given a fair wind of overtaking it in the four weeks of campaigning that is left.
Given Continental-style proportional representation, we might even be expecting a coalition government of the Right that would combine Tories and Reform. Yet our first-past-the-post electoral system means they cancel each other out; only the safest Tory seats look likely to survive their mutual suicide pact.
The resulting Labour supermajority can be argued both ways. One is that it gives Sir Keir all the licence he needs to bypass the middle-of-the-road government he’s promised in campaigning, and instead impose the radical Left-wing agenda some in his party demand.
According to The Guardian, Sir Keir is already being urged by some shadow cabinet members to shore up government spending on unprotected public services by introducing a series of tax rises aimed at business and wealth. Each tax initiative in itself would not amount to much, but together would add up to a substantial number.
Bringing capital gains tax in line with rates of income tax might for instance bring in £8bn alone.
The tax burden is already scheduled to rise to 37pc of GDP in four years’ time on current policies, according to Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts. A tax raid of the type The Guardian hints at might push it closer to a Continental-style 40pc.
But perhaps the better way of looking at Labour’s likely landslide is that it authorises no more than Sir Keir and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have said they’ll do, which is not much at all of major macro economic significance.
The likely scale of the majority makes Sir Keir unassailable, and therefore immune to the crazies in his party looking for a more decisive shift to the Left.
What Labour is about to benefit from is a vote against the incompetence and drift of the last eight years. Voters are on the whole not looking to Labour to enact a different form of it.
Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said that he preferred lucky generals to good ones, and it is eminently possible that the otherwise less-than-inspiring Reeves will prove to be just that.
According to Reeves, Labour is about to get the worst economic inheritance since the war. This is arguably true of the public finances, but it is not the case for the economy as a whole, which is actually in rather better shape than the “broken Britain” caricature gives it credit for.
My guess is that far from being on the brink of another recession, the UK economy is about midway through the current cycle with a good few years of sustained growth to go.
Retail sales look terrible at the moment, admittedly, and it’s true that the global economy as a whole once more shows unnerving signs of stalling.
The US economy, which has been going gangbusters, appears to be slowing fast, with higher interest rates finally beginning to bite. “Goodbye inflation, hello recession?” as the US economist Paul Krugman put it last week.
Meanwhile, Europe looks as flat as a pancake while China is still struggling to get on top of its property bust. But hardly anyone expects the US economy to fall off a cliff, even if it does mildly contract for a quarter or two. The same goes for China and Europe. What we are seeing is a mid-cyclical slowdown, or pause for breath, rather than an end-of-cycle collapse.
As for the UK, first-quarter growth was considerably higher than expected. Encouragingly, business investment has picked up sharply over the last year; inflation has come right back down again.
Interest rates will soon be following suit; and real wages are once more rising.
The long hiatus in business investment seen since the vote for Brexit may finally have run its course. Years of underinvestment may be about to come to an end in a dam-burst of pent-up spending.
Most business leaders I talk to cite political drift and incompetence as a major cause of the blockage, so would welcome the return of more stable government. A more harmonious relationship with Europe, which perhaps only Sir Keir is capable of achieving after the acrimony of recent years, might also help.
The other big hope for the future is our old friend artificial intelligence. We shouldn’t get too carried away in assessing AI’s real-world importance, but it is none the less reasonable to assume potential productivity gain at least as great as that of the IT revolution of the 1990s and early 2000s.
If Britain can stay ahead of the game in applying the new technologies across sectors, AI may finally begin to lift the economy out of its current low-productivity rut.
We cannot know the future, but it is possible to imagine a world in which Donald Trump wins, some kind of peace settlement is carved out in Ukraine and Gaza, and contrary to expectations, tensions between China and the US ease rather than deepen.
Any such scenario may not seem likely at the moment, but further escalation in geopolitical tensions is not inevitable; it is just as possible that things will get better as get worse.
Of course, there is plenty to worry about even in Labour’s published agenda, let alone what it might do once in power. Uncompromising attachment to net zero targets suggests a continued and worrying lack of regard for practicalities and cost to the wider economy.
Yet assuming Starmer and Reeves can keep the hotheads of their party under control, there is no reason to believe the change in government is going to dramatically change the big picture on the economy. Luckily for them, the trend is one of improvement. They’ll have to do an awful lot wrong to derail it.