General elections are about power not protest. Britain entrusts its citizens with the question: who should govern us? As voters in a democracy we have a responsibility to provide an answer; and newspapers owe their readers a clear recommendation. The Evening Standard thinks people should vote Conservative tomorrow. While this campaign has exposed the shortcomings of the Tory leadership, they clearly offer Britain the better party, better policies and better personnel than the alternative.

Here’s why.

We start with the state of the parties. Many voters feel disenfranchised in this election because no party adequately represents them. The centre ground, for so long fiercely contested, feels deserted. But the election is upon us and “none of the above” is not on the ballot paper. Voters have to make a choice.

The current Conservative leadership is moving further away from the social and economic liberalism that has made our country and its capital a global success story. That is the wrong direction. Their legitimate attempt to address the concerns of those who feel left behind by globalisation has ended with them stigmatising the value that immigration brings to Britain, and it has produced a misguided programme of intervention in business.

It has left the large numbers of people who celebrate both the diversity of modern Britain and the dynamism of British enterprise feeling uncomfortable. Thankfully, many of the impressive candidates the Conservatives are fielding know this is a mistake. We have seen in this campaign faces of the future like Amber Rudd and Ruth Davidson, interviewed in this paper today. They have maintained a disciplined silence about their reservations concerning the direction of the party before the polls; we suspect they will make their voices more forcibly heard after the election.

The honeymoon enjoyed by Theresa May and her inner circle has been decisively ended by this election campaign, whatever the result. That gives us much hope that the Conservatives in government will return to that winning combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism that Britain thrives on.

Conservative mistakes should have been exploited by their political opponents. Indeed, the Tories would be facing near-certain defeat tomorrow if they had faced an effective force from the centre. But no such force exists. The Liberal Democrats have performed miserably under their unimpressive leader. We suspect Tim Farron will be one of the casualties of the post-mortem they will have to hold — and rightly so.

Labour chaos

The Labour Party is in an even worse state. The social-democratic movement that has provided Britain with numerous post-war governments, from Clement Attlee’s to Tony Blair’s, has been captured by a hard-Left cabal. The likes of Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott exhibit a bitter dislike of private effort, progress and patriotism. In alliance with just one, deeply unpleasant union leader, Unite’s Len McCluskey, these neo-Marxists have seized control of the commanding heights of their party apparatus, making it very difficult for moderates to seize back control.

This paper feels the pain of the many moderate, Left-leaning voters in the capital and beyond who are in despair at what has happened to the Labour movement. But they must face this uncomfortable truth. It is only if Jeremy Corbyn and his crew are decisively rejected at this election that Labour has a chance of changing its leader, rebuilding itself as a credible party of the centre-Left, forming an effective opposition in the coming parliament and forming a future government. Our message to moderate Labour sympathisers is this: you cannot leave it to other voters to do the tough work; you need to reject Corbyn yourself.

We will see in the coming months whether the Labour movement returns to sanity. What is clear at this general election is that today’s Labour Party is positively dangerous for the country and must not be let near power.

That brings us to policy. This election was an opportunity for all parties to spell out how they would face up to the enormous challenge of Brexit. None of them has done that. Indeed, the campaign has only served to expose finally the unrealistic claims made about what Britain might be able to achieve outside the European Union. The promised £350 million a week for the NHS has not materialised, nor is Britain becoming a new low-tax, low-regulation Singapore in the North Sea.

The Brexit questions

This newspaper asked a series of straightforward questions about Brexit a month ago. How is migration supposed to be cut to the tens of thousands when no one can identify the businesses whose labour supply we will restrict, the universities whose foreign students we will turn away, or the families whose rights to reunion we will restrict still further? How is Brexit going to lead to a net increase in free trade, when leaving the Single Market is the biggest act of protectionism in British history and there is no realistic prospect of new trade deals with other countries anytime soon? Indeed, during this campaign, the Trump administration made it clear that a trade pact with the EU was its first priority and the UK was, to coin a phrase, at the back of the queue.

Are we really going to maintain the same levels of farming subsidies that the much-criticised EU Common Agricultural Policy provides, and do we expect London’s taxpayers to go on writing cheques to the richest landowners in the country? How are we going to maintain Britain’s pre-eminence in science when we withdraw from the EU’s network of scientific collaboration? How are European landing rights going to be secured for our airlines, or European approval arranged for our pharmaceutical products, or market access secured for our massive financial services industry? Not one of these questions has been even addressed, let alone answered, by the main political parties in this election. As a result, it provides no mandate for the details of Brexit.

The Conservative manifesto made welcome ongoing commitments to low tax, welfare reform and a Britain committed to the hard power of defence and the soft power of international development. There was not enough attention given to the budget deficit or the levels of government debt which, with rising pressures on public spending, remains a huge challenge for our country; and next to nothing about the enormous technological changes that are transforming our world for the better but are also threatening traditional patterns of work.

The manifesto had little new of substance apart from a series of anti-business measures and a politically near-fatal package on social care. That is what happens when policy-making is restricted to a tiny group in the party. However, its social care foray rapidly became a spectacular U-turn, and we are sure sensible voices in the Cabinet will disarm the anti-business measures. That is why we are confident that the economic approach pursued by the Tories since 2010, which created record numbers of jobs, remains intact.

The Labour manifesto, by contrast, was loaded with substance — from re-nationalisaton and restoring militant union power, to punitive measures against enterprise and wholesale interventions in the free market.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies states again today that Jeremy Corbyn’s published plans would give Britain the highest level of taxation in its peacetime history. This would drive away investment, destroy business and put people out of work. It would not create a fairer society but a more unequal one. The country would be poorer, and that would mean fewer resources for the NHS and the other public services that the Labour leadership professes to care about. All this will hang like an albatross around the party’s neck for years. They must not be allowed to drag down the country too.

As for personalities, in our democracy we don’t vote directly for the Prime Minister; but we can’t pretend that we only vote for our local MP. We know that our MP will either support Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. Mr Corbyn is the most unsuitable candidate for the premiership ever put forward by a major political party in this country. He has only outperformed expectations in this campaign because those expectations were so low. He presents himself as a kind of Compo figure, from The Last of the Summer Wine. In truth he has the wrong ideas, the wrong values and makes the wrong decisions.

The motley crew he has assembled around him represent the ugly side of hard-Left thuggery. The disappearance on the eve of poll of Diane Abbott, the person he wanted to be the country’s Home Secretary this Friday, reflects his appalling judgment. He could only occupy Downing Street with the support of Scottish Nationalists whose stated aim is the destruction of the nation he would seek to lead. The rest of the world already thinks Britain has marginalised itself with Brexit; the sight of Mr Corbyn representing us abroad would see us entirely written off.

It is true that after her performance on the stump, those who wrote up Mrs May as the new political messiah find themselves embarrassed; but no one doubts her intelligence, diligence or integrity. She is a patriot who works hard to achieve the best for Britain. She did not vote for Brexit, but is right to say that we should try to make the best of it rather than re-fighting last year’s referendum.

Faced with the terror threat that has, tragically, overshadowed this election campaign, she has shown strength and stability. There is no team May today. But if she learns from this campaign to look beyond her tight inner circle, she will find a Conservative movement full of talent from which she can construct a real team.

That is what Britain needs as we make these fundamental decisions about what kind of country we want to be: open or closed; future-facing or backward looking. A vote for Labour — or the minor parties — is a vote for Jeremy Corbyn, and that man can not be allowed to become our Prime Minister. Theresa May is the only person in this election with the policies, party and people capable of leading this country.