Did Jeremy Corbyn win the general election?

Almost five years ago to the day, Amber Rudd had her finest hour in politics.

Standing in for the frit Theresa May at the BBC leaders’ debate on May 31, 2017 – even though her father had died only two days earlier – Ms Rudd rescued a Conservative election campaign that appeared to be collapsing.

Fixing Jeremy Corbyn with a confident stare, she declared: ‘There isn’t a magic money tree that we can shake that suddenly provides for everything that people want.’

The phrase was such a hit that Mrs May repeated it a week or so later after she had finally emerged from the wreckage of her ‘nothing has changed’ U-turn on the dementia tax. The Labour advance was arrested and Mr Corbyn was kept out of Downing Street. But it had been a mighty close-run thing.

Half a decade later many Tories are starting to wonder what the point was of fending off Corbyn at all given the abandonment of fiscal conservatism and frequent shaking of the allegedly non-existent magic money tree that has ensued.

Hundreds of billions of pounds of quantitative easing has taken place, combined with the largest ever public spending and borrowing splurge during the Covid pandemic.