Put these opening four paragraphs in the best order. Have reasons. Give them.

The Australian strategies adopted by Michael Howard and his advisers at this election were, on the other hand, very risky and, in the end, mistaken, exaggerating as they did the significance of immigration and crime within British politics. Many people ‘care’ about immigration and crime, but they do not care about them very strongly: rarely strongly enough to change their vote. As a policy it is tough and appeals to men, but it doesn’t appeal to women; and significantly fewer women voted Conservative in this election than in 2001. If anything, this strategy represented a net loss to the Tories. It didn’t even have much effect in the port towns (see Dover). Furthermore, a party that rides these issues hard is one that fundamentally despises the electorate. If such issues are pushed too hard, the electorate is in danger of grasping that fact. And such policies damage the moral standing of the Conservative Party, and that matters – particularly in the long term. My guess is that most voters regard the Conservative Party as unscrupulously opportunist. Michael Howard’s immediate and (to me) surprising announcement that he will resign ‘sooner rather than later’ might be a recognition of that fact. If, however, his resignation is simply to make way for David Davis, then nothing has been learned. The Conservatives would do well to think harder next time: the old xenophobic parochialism which once did so well for them has weakened as the Conservative working class has disappeared. This culture’s disarray can be measured by the behaviour of the press: with the exception of the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph, all the major broadsheets and redtops implicitly or explicitly supported Labour or, in the case of the Independent, the Liberal Democrats. When Labour is next tempted to follow Conservative practices it should remember this.

Labour has won its historic third term, by the majority (about 65) predicted by the much abused exit poll, and it has done so while receiving the lowest percentage of the vote ever won by a victorious party. The parliamentary majority is much reduced, as everyone has pointed out, but it is ‘much reduced’ only in comparison with Labour’s existing majority: previous Labour leaders would have regarded it as providential.

The problem for the Conservative leadership is that at the moment there are not enough Tories. The old Tory coalition of working-class deferentials and a business and professional middle class which was Conservative by birth – if you were not in the Conservative Association you were not in the swim – has been destroyed, partly by social and demographic change, partly by the (unintended) consequences of Mrs Thatcher’s policies. The Tory working class has gone the way of the whole industrial working class, while the huge middle class is now amorphous and its political loyalties highly fractured. If you are in the Conservative Association today you are not in the swim – just an OAP. This is not to say that the old coalition cannot be reassembled: just that it is no longer the Conservatives’ by right. For the great majority in a now very democratic country the Conservative Party has no special competence or virtue, as to many it once did. Indeed, this great majority is positively anti-Conservative: in the 1950s the second preference of most Liberal voters was Conservative. Today it is Labour. It is not clear what the Tories should or can do about this: the obvious policy, and probably the best policy, is simply to wait on events and assume that Labour will sooner or later come a cropper.

It is clear that were it not for the adventure in Iraq the majority would have been significantly higher. Yet Labour’s victory has, in fact, largely been secured by the continuing weakness of the Conservative Party. While most Conservatives think they had a good night, they actually had a bad one. The Tories gained a little over 33 per cent of the vote, the same as in 2001, and since 1997 their vote has risen by only about 3 per cent: an alarmingly low figure for the country’s historic ruling party. They are now mired as Labour was in the 1930s, and it took the Second World War to get Labour out of the mire. In some senses the Labour vote is also alarmingly low: but it is remarkably efficient. Not many votes are needed to elect a Labour MP. The Conservative performance was not uniformly bad: they did well, for instance, in London, but Labour was there defending a number of seats which it is astonishing it ever won at all – and it still has twice as many London seats as the Tories. In the rest of urban Britain the Tories’ performance was feeble.

Now, check what you think against the original.