It’s a golden opportunity for Cameron

THE Labour Party has responded to its collapse in Scotland and its defeat in England by reaching for a comfort blanket. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader is far more emotional than logical.

There is no doubt that Mr Corbyn’s unspun modesty has struck a chord, at least with a section of the voting public. It is an undeniable achievement to win almost 60 per cent on a first ballot and the poll engaged an impressive number of people, more than twice as many as voted in the final Tory leadership contest in December 2005.

Those who underestimated Mr Corbyn at the start of this race have lived to regret it. And it might be tempting fate to underestimate his chances in the far bigger battle, this time for real power, which will now commence.

That said, it is hard to believe that the undoubted enthusiasm for Corbynmania among the Guardian-reading classes was reflected outside that rather narrow segment of the electorate.

And – though it would be most unwise for Tories to gloat – it provides an opportunity for David Cameron to entrench his party in power for some time to come.

He will have to be subtle. There is a strong temptation to believe that because Labour has marched off into a Bennite fastness, singing The Red Flag, the Tories are now free to rediscover their inner Thatcher.

Some will argue that Labour has made itself unelectable under any circumstances and so freed the first Tory majority Government since 1997 to abandon compromise and follow undiluted conservative policies.

But the Tory victory in May simply was not big enough to allow such behaviour. Mr Cameron has already suffered his first major Commons defeat and the EU referendum is going to be a much bumpier ride than anyone expected, thanks to growing concerns over migration. Ukip is not dead, but only sleeping. Many Liberal Democrat voters may find Mr Corbyn’s anti-war position appealing.

Scotland will still be sending an almost completely anti-Tory army of MPs to Westminster in 2020.

To maintain and expand his party’s hold over government, Mr Cameron needs to colonise the territory Mr Corbyn is abandoning, the aspiring voters who once supported Blairite Labour.

To do so he will have to carry on blending policies which relieve the burden on the taxpayer while continuing to support the many popular and even beloved parts of the NHS and the welfare state.

It may be premature for him or George Osborne to try to rebrand the Tories as ‘the workers’ party’, as the Chancellor sought to do in his July Budget, but the Conservative conversion to support for the minimum wage was shrewd politics. The real argument must always be about the figure at which such a wage is set, not whether a minimum exists.

The Tories have also blunted Labour’s main line of attack, by maintaining NHS and education spending at high levels.

In many ways, their position is similar to that of Harold Macmillan in the late 1950s. He accepted much of the legacy of the 1945-51 Attlee Government as the price of long-term power.

This, unlike Labour’s romantic and sentimental fling with Mr Corbyn, is what real politics looks like. It is often frustrating, and never self-indulgent, but it tends to achieve most of its goals.