SELDOM has an opinion poll provoked such consternation. On May 8th the latest survey of voting intentions for the forthcoming general election in Wales showed the Conservatives on 41%. As Professor Roger Scully, a political scientist at Cardiff University commented, this is a new high for the Tories in any Welsh poll, ever, full stop. The poll showed Labour doing slightly better than before, on 35%, but it was the Tory result that caught the eye. If they maintain that level of support on June 8th, then they really will be pushing into territory that has not been blue for a very long time, or even at all.

I spoke to an understandably upbeat Andrew R.T. Davies the day after the poll was released. The leader of the Welsh Conservatives is old enough, as he told me, to remember a time when there were hardly any Tories in Wales at all. Thatcherism devastated the mining and steel-making communities of South Wales, in particular, during the 1980s, and since then Conservatism has been a dirty word in these parts. Now the main thing that Mr Davies has to guard against is complacency. As he reiterates, the only poll that counts is the one on June 8th, and until then his team will be working flat out.

How to account for this remarkable reversal of fortune? Brexit plays a big role. Unlike Scotland, Wales voted by a good margin to leave the EU, so Theresa May’s Brexit message resonates here. Despite EU money flowing into the poorest regions of Wales, helping to build roads, improve footpaths, boost tourism and much else, resentment has been building up in these impoverished mining towns against globalisation and the elites in Brussels and Westminster for a long time. Merthyr Tydfil, with its rundown high street, forlorn and shuttered by 6pm on a sunny weekday, is precisely the sort of “left behind” place of Brexit folklore.

So Mrs May, a not-so-posh Tory, goes down well in Wales, and, like elsewhere, the Tories are keen to push her alleged “competence” and (yes, you guessed it..) “strong and stable leadership” at every opportunity. And, like elsewhere, for Labour Jeremy Corbyn is something of a liability. Consequently Welsh Labour will probably run a very local general election campaign, emphasising the strengths of Carwyn Jones, the Welsh Labour leader, rather than dwelling much on Mr Corbyn.

How Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party, must be spinning in his grave. He was the local MP until his death in 1915. At least all his successors have been Labour; the current MP has a majority of about 11,000. He must be safe, surely.