Despite tonight's defeat, the PM will eventually get his election

The Tory party is dead; long live the Tory party. The seismic realignment that was supposed to take place in 2016 is finally upon us, and a tougher, rougher, non-deferential conservatism is making its explosive debut.

Ruthlessly focused on the public’s priorities, its ideology is complex. In some ways, it will be more pro-capitalist and pro-freedom: especially on tax, motoring and the nanny state. It will be more conservative on law and order, defence and immigration. In yet other areas, such as health and overall public spending, it will back a larger government, as we saw in a Spending Review that increased overall expenditure by 0.5 per cent of GDP over two years.

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But the biggest difference, of course, is that 31 years after Margaret Thatcher launched the modern Eurosceptic movement with her Bruges speech, her side has finally triumphed. Following the expulsion of the 21 most committed Remainers, Eurosceptics are in almost full control of the Tory party for the first time since the Fifties. If Boris Johnson’s massive, historic bet pays off – by no means certain – he will win the general election by scooping up a fresh demographic attracted by his domestic and European policies. He will then engineer a real Brexit, ensuring the period between 1973 and 2019 is remembered as a historical curiosity, an aberrant era during which the UK was conned into giving up its self-government.