There will always have to be a mainstream Conservative party to represent the 40% of English voters (and 20% of Welsh) who are to varying degrees right-of-centre. That church is broad enough to include the very different views of you and I.

In general elections, under FPTP most ordinary voters will not waste their votes on minor parties.

You are not a crank, but I think your alarmism is not necessary.

Having said that, I think it has been generally a good and interesting debate.

I notice that Tim and friends hasn’t come back and disputed any of the facts as I see them, despite yesterday challenging me to present them.

I’ll just close by saying that many people on here have defended Cameron’s direction because he’s ‘doing ok at the moment’. I don’t think thats really good enough when its clear to see how things are going to develop in the future. The time is now to ensure that pitfalls are avoided. Its no good asking where it all went wrong once you have fallen down. That is why I raised this question in the first place.

Regular contributors to the site might remember that I confidently predicted the hung parliament long before 2010. Indeed, I was saying that it would be hung in 2008-09 when the Tories were 20% ahead in the polls. It was very clear then how it was going to go if you just read the signs.

Similarly in my own local Conservative association my troubles began when I tried to warn them that the course they were on would lead to the party’s wipe out and a huge Labour majority on the city council. It wasn’t a popular message, but I still have to wonder whether things could have been different if it had been heeded (please see the 2010 Stoke city council results to see how that turned out).

And I find myself in a similar position here. If Cameron turns out to be a fantastic Prime Minister who was leading us on all the time and really will be remembered for doing great Thatcheresque things, then I shall be the first to hold me hands up and admit that I was utterly wrong. I shall be regretful that I never trusted him at the time.

…but he won’t be will he. In many years to come, people will be wondering where it all went wrong. Barnaby and others will be going on about how the Tory Party used to be so competitive and marvelling at its rapid decline. Many may not be able to believe that the Tory Party could have been reduced to so few seats. And at that point, I hope you remember that crank Shaun Bennett who used to go on about how things have got to be done differently. And perhaps you might just think to yourselves ‘he wasn’t such a crank after all…’

So few people were interested either generally or personally in overseas aid and the environment.

So we had a Conservative leadership which looked rich and elitist talking about issues which were of little interest to voters.

Is it surprising that the voters thought the Conservatives weren’t interested in ordinary people?

What I said the Conservatives should have proposed was raising the IHT threshold to £1m but increasing IHT to 50% from that point onwards.

Which would have been a taxation shift from the southern middle classes to the rich.

Instead it looked like Cameron was trying to give a tax cut to people like himself.

On the Eton background where Cameron went wrong was surrounding himself with similar people.

Compare with the variety Labour had before 1997:

Blair – New Labour appealing beyond Labour’s traditional voters

Prescott – Old Labour reassuring Labour’s traditional voters

Brown – Scottish banker type, when Scottish bankers were still respected

Where Cameron went wrong was the complacency, the belief that they, and they alone, had personal knowledge of what was needed.

Most important issues facing the country:

Economy/credit crunch/jobs/unemployment 70%
Immigration/asylum 49%
Crime/law and order/police 42%
Health/NHS/hospitals 36%

Most important issues facing you and your family:

Prices/inflation/cost of living 60%
Economy/credit crunch/jobs/unemployment 58%
Pensions/social security/poverty 35%
Immigration/asylum 20%

The contrast between responses to the first question and the second is interesting. While people express concern about how crime and immigration effect the country as a whole, they seem less certain that the difficulties faced by the country in those policy areas effect them personally.

And in the middle of an economic crisis where a lot of voters are seeing the living standards they’ve become accustomed to beyond their reach

The full extent of the cuts haven’t yet hit home but we’ve had a few mass strikes – where Cameron has actually taken most of the public with him, painting the public sector strikers, not entirely inaccuratey, as selfish reactionaries wanting to greedily hang on to their gold-plated pensions while the rest of the country suffers

I can’t imagine any of his recent predecessors pulling that off

Cameron’s simply a lot more likeable and his upper class credentials (Eton, The Bullingdon club) don’t seem to have been the millstone around his neck that some suspected they might be –

For a party that has struggled in recent history to be liked, I think they go do a lot worst than Cameron

That he’s an asset to his party seems beyond doubt

And where does increasing overseas aid and husky hugging rate on the ‘most important issues facing you and your family’ scale?

As HH says economic credibility is vital and Osborne didn’t have it.

Would anyone here want George Osborne in charge of their personal finances?

In which case having Bullingdon Bertie and his chinless wonders as the Conservative leadership was a bit of a drawback.

Especially when their big economic idea was cutting inheritance tax.

It is wrong to pretend that there are any easy solutions to the problems faced by the Conservatives in general elections since 1992. It is my view that David Cameron has made a better fist of things than anyone else would have done. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that much of the fundamental problem is demographic and cultural, and that trying to serve up a kind of reheated 1980s Thatcherism to the electorate would be a disaster.

Shaun has rattled off a list of what he thinks would be popular policies with the British people…..and no doubt on some of those he is dead right, but he is forgetting Bill Clinton’s golden rule “it’s the economy, stupid”. Elections are won and lost primarily on the economy, not on gay marriage or immigration or Europe or capital punishment. As with the Tories in 2001, you can have many policies that are popular with the people, but if you don’t have that economic credibility it makes no difference.