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Well, 5½ weeks to go. Lots of time for the Conservatives to turn this around. A full campaign, by the usual yardstick. Except it’s hard to see what’s likely to change. If the Tories were capable of a barn-storming campaign full of zest and urgency, they would not have pursued the kind of leaden, inert campaign they have until now.

True, they have been held back throughout the early going by events that were not of their, or at least the campaign’s, making: the Duffy trial, the “recession” data dump, the sudden eruption of the Syrian refugee crisis, four years on, as a front-page story. But campaigns that are driving the agenda — that have agendas to drive — are not so easily knocked off course. And campaigns, and leaders, with sound political instincts react to events in ways that turn them to their advantage. Campaigns with no purpose led by people with tin ears do not.

There was no inevitability to any of this. I do not hold with the notion that governments die of old age, that after 10 years or so they simply wear themselves out. To be sure, the longer a government is in power, the more it will tend to fall in upon itself, listening only to what pleases it, unable to see how it is perceived by those outside the tribe. But those tendencies have been with this government from the beginning.

To that extent, the party’s current woes were foreordained. What once were its strengths, in a narrow partisan sense — fierce loyalty, swaggering self-confidence, calculation and ruthlessness in equal measure — have in present circumstances become liabilities. But it has made things much worse for itself in this sour, sullen, strangely passive campaign.