The Prime Minister likes to scare us by warning ‘Go to bed with Nigel Farage, wake up with Red Ed’. But, Mr Cameron, most of us have been through a worse nightmare than that.

To use your own rather tacky imagery, they went to bed in 2010 with an apparently conservative, pro-British Tory leader – and woke up in the morning to find it was all just thick make-up, and that you were a fervent Europhile, a politically correct sexual revolutionary and a Green fanatic.

Let’s have no more mornings like that. Those Tory voters and Tory MPs who fear a Labour victory next year have a real, practical answer to both these fears. Here it is.

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Comfortable: Douglas Carswell (pictured with Nigel Farage) won a landslide victory in the Clacton by-election

Ukip has shown that it can beat Labour in the North of England, where the Tories cannot. Ukip has shown it can energise patriotic, socially conservative voters in the South.

If a large number of Tory MPs now defect to Ukip – as many must be tempted to do – Ukip can be transformed in a few weeks into a real third party which can thrash Ed Miliband in seats he would otherwise win.

I believe that this could create the crisis that Nigel Farage needs and hopes for – the possibility of a workable, hard-nosed post-election pact between the Tories and Ukip, an unequivocal deal to take us out of the EU and give us back control over our borders.

Arithmetically, such an idea makes much more sense than any other strategy – if your aim is truly to stop Labour. Without a Tory split, mountains of Ukip votes would indeed be wasted.

With a Tory split, they would heap up MPs on the anti- Labour side.

Just as in the SDP breakaway in 1981, large-scale defections from the Tories could utterly change the political balance of power in modern Britain.

The alternative is that Tory MPs remain ‘loyal’ to the end, and that we are indeed guaranteed a Labour Government of some sort in May. They can sit around for the next five years moaning, ‘I told you so’, to anyone who cares to listen.

Thrashed on his doorstep: Ed Miliband in Heywood, where Ukip came within a few hundred votes of victory

But what sort of ‘loyalty’ is this? Why should it be thought noble to try to save your party at the expense of your country?

The Tory Party (like Labour) is close to the end of its natural life anyway. It has no automatic right to survive, and its successor is currently being born in places as far apart as Greater Manchester and Essex. Voters are not the property of politicians. When they stop voting for one party, and start voting for another, why do we treat them as deserters who need to be dragged back?

If Tesco fails to attract customers and they go somewhere else, do we browbeat and threaten those customers into returning, or do we recognise that Tesco just wasn’t good enough? If you listen to the BBC and read the grand commentators of the media, you would think that Friday’s election results were bad and disturbing news.

Voters are not the property of politicians. When they stop voting for one party, and start voting for another, why do we treat them as deserters who need to be dragged back?

They remind me of the East German Communists of 1953, furious and resentful that the people – in whose name they ruled – had risen against them.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht jeered sarcastically that perhaps in that case the government should dissolve the people, and elect another.

Well, I think the people are right and the Establishment wrong. These wonderful, exhilarating and truly historic votes are not bad news to me or to many others who have long warned that our country could not be run in this way much longer without being ruined and abolished.

At last, the bone-headed, complacent consensus which has done us so much damage has been challenged.

Mr Cameron would, of course, be the main casualty of the revolt I am urging, which is why he hopes that no such thing will happen.

But he is not as wonderful as he thinks he is, as I believe Her Majesty has recently pointed out to him.

Hero with a helmet camera

Hero: Dave Sherry reports bad drivers to the police

Good luck to cyclist Dave Sherry, who does what we should all do and tries to stop drivers using their phones, especially texting, while driving.

This amazingly stupid activity is also a crime, and many of those who do it are completely unrepentant when challenged – in fact, they are often very rude.

Yet they could easily kill or maim someone thanks to a moment’s crucial inattention. Mr Sherry records them on a helmet-mounted camera, then reports hard cases to the police via a laudable organisation called Police Witness, which passes evidence on to the authorities.

Why is this left to brave private individuals, when the police – endlessly moaning about non-existent staff shortages – have the time and manpower to monitor Twitter and Facebook? And come to that, to dig into reporters’ phone records?

Jamie Angus, editor of the BBC Radio 4 breakfast show Today, thinks it is losing listeners because of too much gloomy news from abroad.

He’s quite wrong. The problem is that the programme has become too feminine.

Even the male presenters, including the once-fiery John Humphrys, now pursue consensus and calm.

What we want is to hear smug public figures properly roughed up, and conventional wisdom defied. Instead, the programme is disdainful to dissenters – if it lets them on at all – and regurgitates received opinion.

It sounds as if the studio is full of scented candles. Snoring Boring.

I wouldn't urge anyone to go to see the new film Gone Girl, so there are no spoiler warnings about what follows.

It contains several episodes of needless violence, one so bloody and lovingly dwelt upon that I had to cover my eyes for what felt like five minutes. There is also some needless explicit sex.

Twice, the female lead, Rosamund Pike, is viciously pushed into walls or furniture by her husband – yet she appears unhurt. I was warned, and I can’t complain.

Needless: Twice in Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike's character is pushed into walls or furniture by her husband

Miss Pike can be a mesmerisingly good actress, and she is, in fact, superb in this film.

I wasn’t sure if the sex and violence would be too high a price to pay. The answer is that they are. The whole thing is a moral desert of deceit, mistrust, crudity and cynicism.

If this is what sells books and films now – and I think it is – we have much to fear.

Almost everything you thought you knew about the war with IS has been proved untrue by the absurd stand-off at Kobane on the Syrian-Turkish border.

Turkey isn’t our ally, even though it’s in Nato. On the contrary, it’s an increasingly Islamist state run by a dangerous demagogue who should worry us as much as IS does.