WHERE DID they go wrong? It may seem premature and ungracious to start the post-mortem examinations with a week still to go before the election. But in truth, it is almost too late. By the end of next week, if the polls are to be believed, nobody will be interested in reading about the Tories and Michael Howard. So the question worth asking today — before we all get carried away with elation or horror at the prospect of another five years of Labour hegemony — is where the Tories went so badly wrong.

Listening to Mr Howard in his interview with The Times this week, it struck me that his errors could be divided into three groups: tactical, strategic and intellectual.

The Tories’ obvious tactical mistake was their decision to focus the campaign on immigration and the mendacity of Tony Blair. By harping on these two negative subjects, the Tories undid all their efforts to present themselves as a forward-looking party, capable of governing modern multicultural Britain, rather than a nasty band of bitter reactionaries, who still believed that there was something illegitimate about Labour’s seizure of power.

This tactical error was amplified by the “dog-whistle” technique imported from Australia by Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ campaign manager. The trouble with dog whistle issues, such as asylum and Gypsies, is that they don’t just attract cuddly labradors and friendly spaniels to the Tory kennel; they round up every mongrel cur in the neighbourhood, and maybe even some rabid foxes. Even worse, if the dog-whistle is wrongly pitched, it becomes all too audible to the voters who were not supposed to hear it and ends up giving a splitting headache to the electorate as a whole.

While attacks on immigration may have galvanised the Tory faithful and attracted some working-class Labour voters, they seem to have repelled the affluent metropolitan middle class, who are not just more liberal in their social attitudes but also dependent on immigrant labour for the newly-affordable conveniences of modern urban life: plumbers, nannies, minicabs and so on. So the Tories’ zeal on this issue made them look extreme and out of touch.

The impression of extremism was truly disastrous, since it devalued the enormous sacrifice which the Tories made when they jettisoned their economic and tax agenda. Mr Howard vetoed promises of major tax cuts in order to project an image of moderation and responsibility to sophisticated middle-class voters; he then sent exactly the opposite message with his attacks on immigration and Mr Blair.

The question of taxes brings us to the Tories’ fatal strategic blunder. By refusing to promise substantial tax cuts, the Tories failed to motivate economic conservatives, leaving themselves entirely dependent on socially conservative voters. In effect, they misread the lessons of the Bush victory in the US. The Tories thought that by emphasising national identity and social issues, they would emulate President Bush and win disgruntled working-class votes. What they forgot was that social conservatism was only half of the American Right’s pincer strategy. Its other arm was the huge economic incentives offered to the wealthy.

Republicans have created a conservative majority from a disparate, even contradictory, coalition. Poor social conservatives voted Republican, often against their own economic interests, because of their social views. Rich economic conservatives voted Republican, often against their social consciences, because of their economic interests. Mr Bush could blow his religious dog whistles loudly because he had stuffed the ears of the rich with money. Mr Howard offered Britain’s affluent classes no economic compensation for their social embarrassment in voting Tory.

Why did Mr Howard make the fatal mistake of ignoring economic self-interest, the bedrock of Conservatism since its earliest days? At the root of this strategic failure was an intellectual failure. When he decided to match Labour promises on public spending, Mr Howard did not seem to understand that Conservatives must always stand for smaller government and lower taxes, as a matter of principle. They can promise to improve on Labour’s management of health and education, but their long-term objective must be to shrink the welfare state. Unless they admit this, they cannot create a consensus, or even an understanding, for what should have been their flagship policies in this election: for example the “patient passports” to subsidise private operations, or the opt-out payments for parents who send children to private and charitable schools.

A Conservative Party that endorses Labour plans for public spending cannot credibly promise to reduce taxes or diminish the dominance of the state, even in the long term. Health, education and pensions already absorb a fifth of national income and are certain to grow much faster than the economy as a whole for decades ahead. If the Tories refuse to question the dominance of the state in these sectors, they lose their ideological justification as champions of economic freedom and private initiative, as well as their appeal as a party of lower tax.

If Mr Howard had set out a longterm plan for shrinking the NHS, promoting private education and taking the state out of pensions, he could have offered voters a convincing prospect of smaller government and large tax cuts — and, like Mr Bush, he could have ignored arbitrary constraints on public borrowing.

If the Tories had campaigned against the state, instead of against asylum-seekers and Mr Blair, they would probably still have lost. But at least they would have started a debate on the size and shape of the public sector that they will need to win if they are ever to return to power. The ideological pendulum rarely swings all the way from Left to Right or back again in one election. This year, the Tories had a chance to start it swinging their way, but they failed to take it. As a result, the impending Labour victory is unlikely to be the last.

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