...They did not vote to express disapproval of Ed Miliband.

Readers of the supposedly diverse British press, and listeners to the BBC, might be forgiven for thinking that the main loser in last Thursday’s elections is Ed Miliband, who is ‘weird’ and cannot tackle a bacon sandwich in the properly elegant manner that is the most essential qualification for office.

Simultaneously, we are told in a survey of key marginals by that interesting man, Lord Ashcroft, that Red Ed is at the gate, like a barbarian horde, and that UKIP may give him an absolute majority of up to 80 seats, by wickedly stealing votes which really belong to the Tory Party.

Well, as so often, you can have one or the other, but not both. But on this occasion, both might turn out to be far-fetched, brain-worms, designed to wriggle into people's minds and stop them seeing what is really happening.

Arthur Koestler, recounting his frantic , darkly funny (as it was successful) flight from the Nazis as they swept down through France in 1940 in that fine book ‘Scum of the Earth’ , mentions the frequent ‘bobards’ or wild, unsubstantiated rumours which swept through the abandoned ungoverned cities and swirling flocks of ill-informed and vulnerable humanity which defeated France had by then become. As they all helped to increase fear, chaos and defeatism, he suspected that they were the work of German agents. Perhaps. Perhaps they just generated themselves out of fear mingled with ignorance.

But this stuff, about the supposed blow to Ed Miliband (and the supposed threat that he will somehow get an absolute majority) is undoubtedly the work of the Tory Party’s expensive spin machine. Having failed with the ‘fruitcake’ strategy, and then failed again with the ‘racist’ strategy, it hopes to save itself by two pincer movements.

One of these is to align with Labour’s sulking Blairites, who want Ed Miliband to lose because they prefer David Cameron, and who (correctly) think the Tory leader is a better imitation of their lost hero, the Conqueror of Fascist Iraq.

They may be on to something here. Mr Miliband has shown flashes of concern for the old-fashioned British working class, and did much to prevent our participation in what would have been a disastrous intervention in Syria. Mr Cameron, in true Blairite tradition, has done neither.

So let us pretend that the principal message of the voting results really is that Ed Miliband isn’t doing very well as Labour leader.

Eh? This is an odd, even eccentric and possibly unhinged way of reacting to the appearance, for the first time in English history, of a dangerous electoral rival to the Tories , built mainly on exiled Tory votes, led by an effective and likeable figure - and at last giving disgruntled Tories a realistic alternative to their own party’s bland and snobbish scorn for everything they believe in.

It is an even odder reaction to the fact that the Tory Party (unlike Labour, which has increased its strength) , has lost a large chunk of its European Parliament contingent, and has done rather badly in local government polls. Labour has also done reasonably, though not spectacularly well in local votes - and remains on course, as it has been for some years, to be largest single party after the 2015 general election.

By the way, UKIP would in my view have done a lot better in local polls had it fielded more candidates. Round where I live, in Oxford, UKIP simply did not stand in many wards, presumably because it lacks manpower and money. Where it did stand, it frequently did rather well, notably in South Witney in Mr Cameron’s parliamentary seat.

And it is , if I may borrow the word , a positively ‘weird’ reaction to the almost total destruction by the voters of the Liberal Democrats, prop and stay of the coalition, and the party whose previous strength propelled Nicholas Clegg into the deputy premiership. If the media gave this event proper prominence, cramming its op-ed pages and discussion programmes with loud voices urging 'Clegg Must Go!' (they are sort of mentioning it as an afterthought) Mr Clegg would not survive the week. But by playing it down, as they are, they may yet help him survive.

The other response is to continue to assume that voters are subnormal sheep, and to shriek at them ‘ Vote UKIP and you’ll let Labour in.’ You have to do this in the hope that these same sheep did not hear you when you yelled, a few minutes before, that Labour under Ed Miliband was hopeless, finished and doomed. How stupid do they think we are?

Of course, the next part of this warning would have to say: ‘And they’ll tax you to oblivion, fill the country with immigrants, mess up the economy with unpayable debt, bring in same sex marriage, concrete over the countryside, force you to pay for forests of hideous, useless windmills, many of them in your backyard or in areas of great beauty, compel you to send your children to dreadful comprehensive schools...

But this denunciation runs out of conviction as these voters count off on their fingers that the Tories are already doing all these things. Does anyone, outside the political commentariat, and outside the Republic of London, actually believe the stuff about Mr Osborne's economic recovery, which is composed entirely of press releases?

Mr Osborne borrows more every day. His new army of the 'self-employed' would be better described as 'self-unemployed'. To examine the growth figures is to intrude into private grief, and every serious economist is horrified by the housing bubble and its attendant dangers. Our main visible exports continue to be scrap metal and air, with which we pay for our Snickers bars, Pinot Grigio and iphones.

Why is it, exactly, that Tory voters should greatly fear a Miliband government? Especially the one they are likely to get, which will be a coalition with whatever is left of the Liberal Democrats at Westminster after May 2015 (more than you might think, for various reasons).

This is plainly panic. The most interesting part of the Prime Minister’s interview on the BBC ‘Today’ programme this morning was when he made a direct personal attack on Nigel Farage for having ‘his wife on the payroll’ and for his expenses. This is a subject Mr Cameron really would be wise to avoid, given his own considerable greed in the generous days before the MPs’ special Housing Benefit scheme was reined in. The rest of the media might one day wake up to this unknown matter, which they have disgracefully failed to cover. (Please see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-hold-an-open-meeting-in-private.html )

But that’s not the main point of mentioning this. Party leaders generally stay clear of the knuckledusters and razorblades-in-the-potato aspects of the political brawl. They affect friendship and civilized relations with their opponents, even if there is none. They concentrate on wider, loftier matters. They leave attacks of this kind to rougher creatures, with cheaper suits and less refined manners, further down the ladder of political life. Or at least they do, when they are in charge of themselves, and their advisers are in charge of them. This was the undisciplined act of a frazzled and worried man, as well it might be.

For there’s another aspect of this moment and the bizarre coverage of it (Did I really see a distinguished BBC commentator on the News Channel this morning going on at Chuka Umunna about how his leader was ’weird’? I did. A hundred thousand pounds of education, and it ends with this infantile blether? ).

Almost everyone is trying to avoid the blazingly obvious meaning of the vote – that a huge number of British voters want us to leave the European Union and to stop mass immigration – the clearest policies of the Party for which they voted.

If it was just general discontent, they could have voted for the Greens, or for Labour - currently the Opposition and so the traditional recipient of general protest votes. Or they could have stayed at home. But in significant numbers they specifically chose not to do so. They actively voted for UKIP, whose nature and aims could not have been clearer. And they continued to do so despite being sprayed with verbal slurry accusing them of bigotry and worse.

If our existing parties believed, as they claim to do, in democracy, it might cause them to wonder if their current policies, in favour of the EU and immigration, are right, or whether they should be dropped. No commercial organisation, facing such a comprehensive rejection of its product, would react by calling its customers rude names, or by pretending that they had in fact rejected the products of a rival, on which they had expressed no opinion.

But there’s no question of this, because the major parties have long seen their job as representing power to the people, rather than the other way round.

And it reminds me of the great moment when Berthold Brecht, the mordant and cynical Communist playwright, observed his East German comrades reacting angrily to a workers’ uprising in Berlin – an uprising against what was supposed to be their own state, which had cut their wages.

Brecht wrote sarcastically :’The Secretary of the Writers Union had flyers distributed in Stalin Allee that said that the People had frivolously thrown away the Government's confidence and that they could only regain it through redoubled work. But wouldn't it be easier if the Government simply dissolved the People and elected another?’

In fact the ruling Communist Party arranged ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations, led by Marxist-Leninist youths wearing shorts, carrying professionally-made banners saying ‘Our answer to the provocateurs: strong trust in the government!’ . Pictures exist. No doubt the Tories wish they could command the voters to take part in a march through the Home Counties with banners saying saying 'Trust in David Cameron is our response to the UKIP provocateurs'. But they can't.

So they have to do something else instead. They pretend that the voters haven't actually done what they have done.

Our media elite haven’t dissolved the people and replaced them, much as they would like to. The media class have just invented, in their minds, a wholly different electorate whose main aim, last Thursday, was to rebuke Ed Miliband for his poor bacon sandwich skills, and for not being his ghastly Blairite brother, whom they all for some reason admire (Is it because he still won’t say the Iraq war was wrong, unlike Ed?).

And at the moment they continue to dwell in this alternative reality, which they have made to comfort themselves. They may well stay there, much as they continued to believe (against all the clear and obvious evidence) that David Cameron would win a majority in 2010. You can’t beat wishful thinking for driving people mad.

Is anyone outside the political-media class fooled?

But the media class is clearly utterly exasperated by these annoying voters, who won’t fit in with their plan to continue Blairite government, by somehow keeping David Cameron in office after May 2015. I did, I admit, get a very low passing grade in my ‘O’ level elementary maths back in 1967. But I cannot come up with any formula by which the Tories, weaker than they were in 2010, and not blessed by the presence of Gordon Brown in Downing Street, can possibly get a majority in a UK election in 2015. Nor can I see how the Liberal Democrats can save their bacon if they don’t go into the campaign unambiguously pledged to refuse any further pact with the Tories.

And that word 'pact' brings me to the next thing. Tory ‘Eurosceptics’, those odd pushmepullyou chimeras who serve a party that is enslaved by the EU, yet claim to be severely critical of the same EU, have begun once more to talk of an electoral pact with UKIP.

I really hope nobody in UKIP is stupid enough to listen to this. It would have only one purpose – to destroy UKIP. A party whose main aim is departure from the EU cannot form a coalition with a party totally and irrevocably committed to staying in. By forming such an alliance, it would forfeit its entire position as the new, fresh outsider party, and become just one more cynical machine. I find it difficult to imagine what sort of person could even come up with such a suggestion – one who has no idea of the meaning of the word ‘principle’, I suppose. Compromise is essential. But when compromise sacrifices principle, it becomes betrayal.

As for Mr Cameron’s refrain that his is the only party promising a referendum, I am cheered by how ineffectual it is.

There’s only one way out of the EU: a party committed by unequivocal manifesto pledge to leave, being elected with a working parliamentary majority. That party will not ever be the Tories. That's why they talk of a referendum - to look as if they plan to get us out, when they really mean to lock us in forever.

Can it be that others, apart from me, can see a) that Mr Cameron is a smooth breaker of such promises, as was the case with his ‘cast-iron’ pledge over the Lisbon Treaty. He does not truly expect (or in my view want) to be in a position to keep his promise, and hopes only to save his party from near-destruction in 2015 by this ruse? b) that if by some mischance he ever was compelled to keep his promise, he would pretend to have won concessions from Brussels when in reality he had none (just as he pretended to have wielded the veto when he hadn’t, in December 2011) , and would rely on his media allies to get a vote to stay in, using scares and slanders?

But they wouldn’t do that, would they? Thank God, you cannot bribe or twist, the honest British journalist…