It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the immigration crisis that now faces Tony Blair

After the 2001 general election massacre, a consensus swiftly established itself in the Conservative party. William Hague had fought on the wrong issues. Instead of Europe and asylum, his chosen battlegrounds, he should have championed health and education. Hague’s mistake, so conventional wisdom held, doomed the Conservatives to be the rancid voice of the malcontents, the losers, the racists: the detritus of 21st-century Britain.

This persuasive analysis, associated above all with the so-called ‘modernisers’, swiftly took hold in Tory high command after Hague’s abrupt departure. It held sway under Iain Duncan Smith, and even more so under Michael Howard. For the last three years prodigious efforts have gone into establishing the Conservative party as sound on public services. This project reached its culmination back in February, when the shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin promised to meet Gordon Brown’s hugely ambitious spending targets for health and education.

This was the moment, so the modernisers felt, when the Conservative party returned to the British political mainstream.