Beneath the radar, the Tory party is working on a strategy to win by a landslide

These are bad times for Conservatives fighting the tightest marginal seats. About a year ago they were given generous resources to help them campaign, to promote their candidates and to rubbish Labour in general. Now, the cash is drying up. Unofficially, these target seats are being designated as ‘in the bag’ and the money instead is being diverted to constituencies that, pre-Cameron, were regarded as utterly unwinnable. No one in Conservative headquarters is calling it by its name — to do so would court the lethal charge of complacency — but what is being discreetly developed is nothing less than a landslide strategy.

This explains the energy with which the Crewe by-election was fought. It was the 165th most winnable seat, situated on terrain traditionally inhospitable to Conservatives. From the outset, David Cameron was pessimistic about his prospects, fearing that his party was either cursed in by-elections, or simply unable to fight on the ground with the precision and ferocity of the Liberal Democrats. ‘They like campaigning in the same way that our members like doing lunch,’ one senior Cameroon told me, summing up the gloom early on in the campaign.

Yet if there is to be a Tory landslide (the latest YouGov opinion poll suggests a Tory majority of 194) then Crewe needs to be a permanent gain. This means the Tory general election strategy must switch from a marginal seat campaign to one reaching out to places that even Thatcher failed to take. So the Crewe campaign became a proxy — albeit surreptitiously so — for an exploratory landslide strategy.

Each member of the shadow Cabinet was ordered to make the pilgrimage to Crewe at least three times. In my brief visit there I saw more senior politicians mulling around than can be found in any Commons bar on a normal day — Jack Straw trebling the police presence with his entourage and Mr Cameron himself becoming the temporary town mascot.