I'm really going to need some sleep soon, but FWIW, here is my immediate post-match analysis.
Polls - Exit poll vindicated again, as in 2005. Opinion polls seriously flawed. Even the night before the almost universal message was Conservatives 36/7, Labour 27/8, Lib Dems 27/8. As I write the vote share is Conservatives 36, Labour 29, Lib Dems 23. That error of 5% or so on the Lib Dems is huge, and will surely lead to methodology changes.
Models of Polls into Seats - Uniform swing models claiming the Conservatives needed a 10% advantage for a majority broadly failed. Differential swing models claiming that a 7% lead and 37% vote were the magic requirements for achieving an overall majority were basically vindicated.
The last four weeks of the campaign - Labour polled below 30%. I believe that if we had attacked them more they could have been driven down at least a couple of percentage points lower than that, and that difference would have been enough to secure us a comfortable majority. We wasted a great deal of time countering a Lib Dem threat that didn't ever exist. We didn't tell the public the truth: that Labour failed. This was especially true in the last week of the campaign, when we allowed Labour to recover from its weekend disarray. However, in truth campaigns rarely make much difference to the result, and despite all the media hype this campaign was no exception - 36/29/23 isn't terribly far from where the polls were just before the final four week campaign began.
The five year campaign - Over the past few days, there have been a number of articles written saying that it would be a great achievement for the Conservatives to get any kind of majority. I shall charitably describe that as "loyal nonsense one feels obliged to write just before polling day." The truth is that no great miracle was required for us to win a comfortable majority here. All we needed to do was get 40% of the vote - surely a pretty standard threshold for success for any party. A failure to get anywhere near 40% in a fundamentally Conservative country, when a hopeless, exhausted, divided, imagination-free Labour government had totally screwed up the economy, utterly mis-managed the public finances, achieved almost none of its real aspirations in terms of domestic reform and faced the total collapse of its foreign policy can only be described as hapless. For all the triumphalist talk of "detoxification" and "modernisation", our vote share was not materially higher than in 2005. Our entire five-year campaign has got us absolutely no progress at all, despite our opponents disintegrating before our eyes. It has been, without any doubt, a failure. The Party has been asked to swallow all kinds of insult, all kinds of incoherence, all kinds of poverty of ambition, all kinds of biting our tongues when we wanted to speak. And our reward has been: zip; nada; nothing. No additional vote share at all.
Modernisation has failed, electorally.
Perhaps now, instead of vanity being our guiding principle - our continuous obsession since 1997 - we could think about actually arguing for what we believe in for a change?
What to do now - No coalitions with anyone. No deals with the Lib Dems. Rule as a minority government. Put forward the policies we believe in, and dare our opponents to vote them down. In particular, there will be no time to waste on the deficit.
The one virtue we may be able to get out of this mess is the following. The Lib Dems say that no spending area should be ringfenced. Perhaps that and our minority government status might be used to allow us to wriggle out of our ridiculous NHS ringfencing pledge?
