“ALL right, fine, but you’re missing the crucial point,” said one of David Cameron’s captains, when Bagehot bothered him with some snipe or other at the Conservatives’ loveless election campaign. “The one thing all our focus groups tell us is that no one wants Ed Miliband to be prime minister”.

The unpopularity and unnerving left-wing idealism of the Labour Party’s gauche leader is the Tories’ comfort blanket. The economic recovery they have overseen may appear to be voteless, their spending cuts to be semi-permanent and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to have pinched a fifth of their followers. Yet they take solace in the haplessness, which they consider terminal, of a politician who used the unions to best his abler brother, David, was in turn beaten by a bacon sandwich, and who has had the worst ratings of any Labour leader in recent times. Mr Miliband’s main achievement, according to his allies, is to have held his party together; he has performed that service for the Tories, too. If deficit reduction was the raison d’être of their coalition government, Miliband reduction has kept the Tories united. They simply cannot quite believe that, despite Labour’s big advantages in this election, including a windfall of disaffected Liberal Democrat votes and an electoral map stacked in its favour, Britons could send such a despised politician to 10 Downing Street.

But with the election only weeks away and the polls deadlocked, that faith has been seriously tested—such that last week the Tory high command panicked and hit out. Michael Fallon, the biddable defence secretary, predicted that, to gain governing support from the anti-nuclear Scottish National Party, Mr Miliband would “stab Britain in the back”, just as he had his brother, by junking the nuclear deterrent. This was as self-defeating as it was imbecilic—the Tories’ main problem being a whiff of toxicity that the moderate Mr Cameron has failed to aerate away. And if Mr Fallon’s low blow got voters wondering what other invectives against “the Millipede”, as Boris Johnson, the ribald mayor of London, calls Mr Miliband, were unjust, the Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid, then threw a lower one—by “exposing” the fact that the Labour leader, in the years before he met his wife, had three or four previous girlfriends. This was risible and also prone to backfire. “The moment I found out we were in trouble”, laments a Tory backbencher, “was when I walked into a pub full of UKIP supporters and heard a bloke at the bar say: ‘So how did that muppet shag all those birds?’”

Whichever party wins next month, this embarrassing episode will feel formative. If the Tories win, it will be because it helped jolt them to their senses. Eventually appreciating that nastiness and his party’s habit of relentless reduction—of the state and of his rival—had gone too far, Mr Cameron ordered a last-ditch infusion of optimism and positivity, which was evident in the rejigged manifesto he presented on April 14th. Though it contained a lot of dreary giveaways—from a party that claims to be nothing if not fiscally responsible—it stood for his belated appreciation that the electorate wants inspiration, not vituperation, security, not rows. The Tories cannot win this election by being crushingly negative.

In truth, there are troubling questions to be asked of Mr Miliband’s statist instincts, limited interest in enterprise and painful indecisiveness. But the Tories’ attacks on him have always said as much about their own inadequacies. These go beyond a certain unpleasantness and the lopsidedness of the recovery. They include, even by Westminster standards, a staggering lack of self-awareness, which often makes a mess of their tactics. In knocking Mr Miliband, for example, top Tories hope to find a precedent in the 1992 election, when John Major, a respected, but not loved, Tory leader, with a similarly robust record for economic competence as Mr Cameron has, scored a last-ditch win over a similarly reviled Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Perhaps something similar is about to happen. Yet among the many great differences between now and then is the fact that Mr Cameron and his well-heeled captains are far more establishment figures than Mr Major was, at a time when a surly anti-establishment feeling is raging. The effect is to make Mr Miliband—a product of Oxford and Harvard—appear more of an outsider than he is, which, given the boldness of his ambition to reform British capitalism, is just what he wants.

Another effect of the barracking is to highlight his strongest attribute, an ironclad resilience, forged of a deep—in fact, slightly worrying—self-belief. This is now receiving almost as much comment on the trail as that bacon sandwich. Because the Labour leader is suddenly on a roll.

Revenge of the Millipede

Having been exaggeratedly slurred, he was bound to surprise on the upside. “He only had to show he didn’t have two heads, and he was away,” notes another concerned Tory. Yet his early showing has been impressive. In two television debates (or quasi debates), Mr Miliband’s hunger to bring change was manifest; Mr Cameron, though competent, appeared cowed by comparison. The Labour press team has pushed that advantage, for example, by promising a well-judged end to the privileged tax status some super-rich Britons and foreign residents enjoy. The result has been a big improvement in Mr Miliband’s personal ratings, inching them, in some polls, into positive territory for the first time.

This may pass. Labour’s policy cupboard may be bare. Mr Cameron will push back, and Mr Miliband’s unattractiveness as a politician is not all a Tory creation. So if the Labour leader now looks more like Lord Kinnock in his 1987 election pomp than the Tories would like, they can still find solace in the fact that Labour lost that one, too. All the same, Mr Miliband’s late flourishing should make them regret the vast amount of time they have spent deriding him. As the electorate is already telling them, it could have been time far better spent.