What if we have left it too late? What if three years of dreary and petulant delay have made possible the one outcome that, in a country like Britain, should have been impossible – namely the election of a Marxist-led government?

Had Theresa May stood down after the 2017 election, the Conservative Party would now be hoovering up mainstream Labour voters repelled by Jeremy Corbyn. Had she been ousted last December, her successor would have inherited a healthy lead. But now the opinion polls have the Conservatives in fourth place – something that has never happened before. According to Electoral Calculus, the party would win just 22 seats.

The Tories are belatedly holding the leadership contest they should have held three years ago. This time, the contenders are clever, charismatic and qualified. They fizz and gurgle with brilliant ideas, from well-aimed tax cuts to ways of easing the housing shortage. There is a parallel universe somewhere where the Tories were spared the three-year Theresa May hiatus. In that universe, Britain has left the EU, the Labour Party has been pulled apart by the tensions between its MPs and its Trotskyist activists, and we have avoided a hideous culture war that expresses itself in broken friendships, malicious lawsuits and hurled milkshakes.

Back in our own universe, Mrs May is serving out her time, forgotten but not gone. Around her, the political landscape has been left blasted and sterile. Her party is demoralised, with many of its lifelong supporters alienated. Its donors have walked away, leaving it destitute. Worst of all, Mrs May has bequeathed us an almost impossible position on the EU. She accepted demands from Brussels that no one else would have countenanced, including the economic surrender of Northern Ireland and EU control over our trade. Eurocrats might have proposed those ideas in a mischievous and speculative spirit but, now that they have been publicly accepted by a British leader, they will not easily be put back in the bottle.

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At the same time, Mrs May’s broken promises and postponements have left her successor with almost no room for manoeuvre. In normal times, a new PM might reasonably wait to see whether the European Commission that takes office in November is less doctrinaire, readier to look for mutual wins. But, in the current mood, any further delay would be portrayed as a surrender.

There are some lines of Kipling’s that I don’t seem able to get out of my head:

This is the midnight – let no star Delude us – dawn is very far. This is the tempest long foretold – Slow to make head but sure to hold.

No one has yet come up with an answer to the Tory Catch-22 that I flagged up in these pages three weeks ago, namely that the Conservatives can’t face the electorate without having first delivered Brexit, but can’t deliver Brexit without picking up more seats. If the Tories don’t lead the government then, by a process of elimination, Labour does.

Until recently, I had assumed that Corbyn could not win an election. Britain was a decent, level-headed, quietly patriotic country. There was no way, it seemed to me, that it would embrace a leader who was prepared to side with any tyrant or terrorist who was sufficiently anti-British. It was simply not in our character, I thought, to vote for someone who regretted the outcome of the Cold War.

But what if I am right and he wins anyway? What if more than two thirds of us recoil from the prospect of a Chavista government, but the electoral system still delivers one? Consider what happened at the Peterborough by-election. The town returned a 61 per cent Leave vote in 2016, but is now represented by a Euro-fanatical Labour MP elected on 31 per cent of the vote. Can you be sure something similar won’t happen nationwide?

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The first-past-the-post system is capricious. It props you up until, all of a sudden, it gives way under your feet. Look at what happened to the Liberal Party in the Twenties. Look at what happened to Scottish Labour in 2015.

Perhaps an even more apt parallel, though, is with the Canadian Tories who, in 1993, went from holding a parliamentary majority to having just two surviving MPs. Why? Because they had become separated from their base, opening a gap for a new insurgent movement, the Reform Party. It took 13 years for a reconfigured Right-of-centre party to come back under Stephen Harper – whose background had been in Reform, not the Tories. The difference, of course, is that Canada was governed during those 13 years by a moderate Liberal Party, whereas Britain faces Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell.

Can we avoid that fate? Some talk hopefully of a Tory/Brexit Party pact, but it is hard to see how one could work in practice. I asked Harper, who is one of the wisest political analysts I know, what he would do in our situation. Drawing on his experience in Canada, he cautioned against any deal with Nigel Farage. Our best shot, he reckoned, was for the new PM to bring the Brexit issue to a head right away and, if the Commons did not support him, to call a snap poll, asking for a mandate to deliver on the referendum result.

It’s one hell of a roll of the dice. Even a year ago, the country would surely have rallied. Plenty of moderate Remainers would have disliked the sight of British politicians working to undermine our negotiating position. Plenty of habitual Labour voters would have been repelled by Corbyn. Now, though, an election is a far riskier idea. The trouble is, I can’t think of a better one.