In 2001, when the Conservatives lost an election in which they had focused heavily on Europe and asylum seekers, moderates in the party patted themselves on the back. Now, they told themselves, the party would realise the folly of chasing fickle protest votes and return to what it did best: seizing and holding the crucial centre-ground of British politics. The strategy pursued by William Hague, who had drawn the wrong conclusions from mid-term elections during the 1997-2001 parliament (not least the 1999 European election), had been conclusively debunked. Others demurred. In his book “The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron”, the historian Tim Bale writes that in 2003, Liam Fox, then chairman of the Conservative Party, advocated a “shift of emphasis away from public services towards immigration, crime and, of course, Europe—the issues Hague had focused on in 2001. ‘William’, he said, ‘had many of the right issues—it was just the wrong election.’ ‘Politics,’ he claimed, ‘has now shifted.’ As a result, it would be ‘amateurish’ not to focus on immigration, crime and, of course, Europe, which he claimed was ‘roaring up as an issue’.” In 2005, under Michael Howard, the party duly fought an election on those very issues (with the same campaign chief that it has just rehired, Lynton Crosby)—and lost badly. Today, as the dust settles on the Eastleigh by-election, the “right issues, wrong election” crew are out in force. The result, they confidently declare, militates for a lurch to the right. Do they have a point? In a constituency that the party once held, the Conservatives saw their vote-share fall by 14 percentage points and ceded second place (behind the incumbent Liberal Democrats) to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which came within 2,000 votes of winning. The election, some commentators insist, is a wake-up call: David Cameron must learn from UKIP’s example—and ape its agenda. This conclusion overlooks several facts. First, the Conservatives fought a resolutely UKIPish campaign. They strongly emphasised Europe (and Mr Cameron’s recent speech—deliberately conceived as a response to the UKIP threat—offering a referendum in the next parliament), and fielded a candidate with robust views on gay marriage, abortion and immigration. They attacked the Lib Dem candidate for supporting house-building in the constituency. In an interview with the right-wing Express last weekend, the prime minister vowed to “get tough on freeloading foreigners” (as the paper delicately put it).

Second, the Lib Dems—a pro-European, socially liberal party—held this distinctly un-metropolitan seat in the direst of circumstances: relentless media hostility, an unpopular leader, an underwhelming candidate, the resignation and trial of Chris Huhne, the former Lib Dem MP, and allegations of impropriety on the part of the party’s former chief executive, Lord Rennard.

Third, the result in Eastleigh consolidated UKIP’s position as Britain’s pre-eminent protest party—of the sort that causes upsets in by-elections and European votes but is reliant on a constantly-shifting, motley collection of right- and left-wing voters motivated by a large range of issues. A consistent, biddable bloc it is not. Why would anti-establishment voters support a Tory mimicking Nigel Farage when they can back the real thing? Does Mr Cameron really want to chase after this elusive gallimaufry at the expense of other voters’ support?

Indeed, that very error seems to have played a part in the Tory defeat. By tacking to the right in a deliberate (and evidently unsuccessful) attempt to contain UKIP’s rise, the Conservatives made it easier for the Lib Dems to “differentiate” themselves from their coalition partners. Nick Clegg’s advisers plan to hold seats at the next election by presenting their party to centrist voters as the moderate, sensible wing of the coalition. In Eastleigh, such voters reading the torrent of leaflets that poured through their letterboxes over the past three weeks would have been forgiven for associating the Conservatives with hostility to the EU, to immigrants and to new housing and the Lib Dems with cutting taxes for low- and middle-earners. The result suggests that even in the feverish, protest-prone atmosphere of a by-election, in Lib-Tory marginal seats like this—and both parties reckon that such constituencies will decide the next general election—, centrist messages about living standards are a better rallying point than various shades of bombast about pesky foreigners.

Yesterday’s vote will help to bolster Nick Clegg’s beleaguered leadership. It will cause Labourites—who obtained a relatively low vote, even for Eastleigh—to ponder how to do better in southern England. It will put the wind in UKIP’s sails (an outright by-election victory and first place in the 2014 European election are within the party’s grasp). But most significantly, it will cause another bout of soul-searching in the Conservative Party—and put massive pressure on David Cameron to Do Something.

He would be well advised to consider the party’s dark night of the soul in the early 2000s. In the eminently winnable 2005 election (a time when, polling suggests, Britons were both more exercised about Europe and less socially liberal than they are now), the Conservative Party ran an UKIPish campaign under the slogan “are you thinking what we’re thinking?” Back then the answer from electorally-decisive voters was: “err, no”. The same, it seems, was true in Eastleigh yesterday. The party should be wary of making the same mistake in 2015.