The most recent cover of the new and increasingly feisty New Statesman portrays Gordon Brown and Dave Cameron in a dust-up, the latter in the uniform of the beloved victim of a thousand boys’ magazines — the Eton toff, top hat being knocked into the dust. “Game On” reads the legend. The mood is all around.

new-statesman

After months in which the Tories seemed unassailable and Labour blundered from one disaster to the next, Brown’s desperate and bedraggled mob now seem to be in with a chance. Actually, more than a chance — a recent YouGov poll had them trailing the Tories by no more than 4%. Though that one was universally seen as an outlier, other polls have now rounded the gap out to 5-6%.

Were that to be reflected in an election, and allowing for the endless variations of first past the post, it would still leave the Conservatives short of an actual majority — and on some scenarios, leave Labour as the party with the largest number of seats, and thus with first nod to form a minority government in a hung parliament.

Hung Parliament … the words have been bouncing around the place for months, but no one has taken them seriously. It’s been generally understood that the possibility was only raised to draw some skerrick of interest from what would otherwise be a walkover.

Now, the possibility has become so live that two things have happened: first, a manual of caretaker government practice has been compiled, to which all parties have consented, and secondly, someone is paying attention to the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems had earlier ruled out taking part in a coalition government should the possibility arise, a position they have now modified slightly to saying they would definitely be in a coalition, yes please, when do we start we can be around by nine — with deputy leader Vincent Cable saying, unbidden, that he would even serve in a cabinet.

The politics of a three-party, first-past-the-post system are fascinating, and endlessly mobile. For the Lib Dems, shoring up their supporters was hitherto achieved by firmly rejecting any possibility of a sell-out, a sense that it was a pseudo-vote. Now, with left-liberal voters in dozens of seats facing the possibility that voting for the smallest major party would allow a minority Conservative candidate to triumph, the party is eager to assure their supporters that they would support a party to render stability, i.e. they would support Labour to keep the Tories out.

Though there is a free-market faction of the Lib Dems — the so-called Orange Book group — who would be more comfortable supporting the Tories, they are in a decided minority. Much of the party is to the left of Labour, and not merely on social issues. The party is a political Mandelbrot, the whole spectrum curled up in a single outfit.

With the rare scent of life around them, Labour is starting to feel chipper again, with the result usual to such circumstances — Gordon Brown is starting to look better. It’s nothing he’s done or not done, it’s simply the deeply irrational nature of human perception, that a random process turning up trumps suddenly gives the illusion of control. Brown appeared before the interminable Iraq war inquiry last week and conducted himself competently, gaining extra points for expressing the regret that his predecessor Tony Blair could not find within himself to give.

So in the absence of any actual achievement by the Labour government, and with increased mutterings that the country’s economy has vague Grecian touches around the temples, the search for causes of the Tories’ precipitous fall, falls squarely on the Tories themselves, and on the small Notting Hill clique around Cameron, which took over the party after its demoralising defeat in 2005.

No one event seems to have been crucial to the process — it has been the death of a thousand cuts. The gloss started to come off with the bizarre billboard campaign, featuring only Cameron’s face, airbrushed, so that he looked like a giant manatee. Then there was the party’s blurred image, part Swedish-style centre-rightism — “I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS” being a typical non-sequitur — which has made it look wobbly and indecisive at a time of crisis. Brown gained some further points by the expedient of doing a TV interview about how he felt about the death of his first child, a genuinely awful act of obeisance to Britain’s demented emotional politics.

But it was the return of Lord Ashcroft, the party’s deputy-chairman, who has been a foreign resident for tax purposes (in Belize, which he largely owns) for years. When raised to the peerage he swore he would become a full UK resident — that was in 2000, and he is yet to catch up with the paperwork on this. That fact, and Cameron’s decision to stand by Ashcroft’s integrity — before it was revealed that he was, in Brit language, a non-dom–– seems to have been the final kiss-off for a select bunch of swinging voters.

It confirms in one hit that the Tories are no better than Labour in terms of sleaze, that Tory-style sleaze continues on its merry way, that they simply can’t help themselves no matter what they say, and that Cameron is just another politician.

For Cameron, the poll shift now is especially frustrating, because he has so many enemies to the right of him, that a fair few would be willing to see him lose this one, as the price of regaining control of their party. They argue that, had the party stuck to a Thatcherite line, rather than dabbling in all this social market, green, etc nonsense, the GFC would have dropped the election in their lap. We’ll never know, but the argument is a tenuous one at the very least. Cameron’s crew got the Tory polling out of the basement a couple of years ago, and it was only done by convincing a core of swinging voters that the party was definitely post-Thatcher touchy-feely-huggy etc.

The trouble is, even while the public began to grudgingly accept Cameron, and as his sheer novelty sent the polls soaring, his actual personage — the soft boyish Tory, surrounded by others of that ilk — was always suss. Once it collapsed, it went quickly, and he’s become just another Eton Tory twat.

With eight weeks to go before the near-certain election date of May 6 (unless Brown stages an ambush), there is panic in Tory ranks at the prospect of losing this one. It would be a loss worse than Labour’s ’92 debacle, a howling out of the Tory party, moderates and Thatcherites alike.

The only downside to such a prospect is, of course, that it would involve Labour winning.

Short of an asteroid, one searches in vain for a way they can all lose. Game on.