Can Nigel Farage take the Tories to victory?

Despite the consistent poll lead and projections of a majority of about 40 seats, the Tories are still nervous. They are nervous because they are uncertain, because their route to victory involves taking seats that the Tories haven’t won in living memory, so no one has a proper sense of how well (or otherwise) it’s going.

The debacle of the last general election campaign has left the Tory party with a collective fear of terra incognita. At the start of that campaign, there was talk of the Conservatives sweeping through the Labour heartlands, but instead they had a lesson in how badly campaigns can go wrong. The Labour vote is resilient, and there is scepticism even among the cabinet about some of the places that the Tories are trying to take this time. ‘Only a certain number of target seats are realistic,’ warns one secretary of state.

Worse, the Tories now have no safety net.