The Tories have but one hope - to call a leadership election immediately

Over the weekend, there was more bad news for the Tories. Out in Buckinghamshire, the party hierarchy had a successful conference, with Iain Duncan Smith making a goodish speech. At the end, the MPs set off in a cheerful mood – and that is the bad news. Any Tory who is feeling comfortable about his party's prospects is only detached from reality.

Before the local elections, there was anecdotal evidence for a mild Tory revival. Reports from the doorstep indicated that while Labour support was soft and sullen, those who identified themselves as Tories were pretty determined to vote. But there was still a problem: the party's leader, IDS, aroused so much criticism that many canvassers were reduced to assuring potential voters that it was safe to vote Tory because he would have nothing to do with their local government.

It did not work. In favourable mid-term circumstances, the Tories could not even reach 35 per cent of the vote. That was the leader's fault. Though the figures for seats gained may sound impressive, this is a snare and a delusion. On these figures, there is no reason to hope for significant parliamentary advances, and every reason to fear further losses.

We know only one thing about the next general election. The British electorate will never have been more volatile. Unless the Tories raise their game, there is another distinct possibility: that the voters will never have been more alienated. Between 1992 and 2001, one fifth of the electorate stopped voting. During the last election, I met a number of people who were boasting about their determination not to vote. For the first time in political history, abstention had become socially respectable.

Since 2001, largely because of Tony Blair's failures, disillusion with politics has grown. On present trends, there is every reason to expect a further fall in turn-out: a further seeping of votes to fringe parties. This could be good news for the biggest fringe of all: the Liberals.

Since 1997, many Tories have placed their hopes on a swing of a pendulum. The Government would make a mess of things; the voters who had been seduced by Mr Blair would stop buying his act; Tory Britain would come home. But that is no longer how the world works.

Swinging pendulums may be good physics; they are bad politics. Voter behaviour is much less mechanistically or tribally determined than before. Contempt is widespread for the language, the practices and the personalities of politics. Fewer and fewer people believe that politicians can do anything for them. There is a withdrawal of trust. Given all that, we no longer have a right-left pendulum. Instead, if there is one at all, it is a Heisenberg uncertainty pendulum, obeying no known laws. If the Tories hear swinging these days, it might not be a pendulum. It might be the gallows.

It ought to be intellectual nonsense to talk in terms of the British electorate, thus anthropomorphising an abstraction and implying that millions of British voters cast their ballots as if they were a single organism. Yet however dubious the concept, the British electorate is an indispensable piece of political shorthand – and that electorate has concluded that Iain Duncan Smith is not prime ministerial material. The electorate is right.

Such verdicts can have a decisive effect on electoral outcomes, as in 1992, when the voters made a similar, and similarly correct, assessment of Neil Kinnock. The same could happen next time, especially as Mr Blair's determination to cripple the Tories is as great as ever.

In many ways, that is not a rational response. After the Iraq war, the PM ought to despise the Liberals and feel a certain respect for IDS. But that is not how his emotions operate. The more Mr Blair is accused of being a closet Tory and the more he finds it easier to do business with generals and ambassadors than with teachers or social workers, with George Bush rather than with Gerhard Schröder, the more he seems to feel the need to compensate and to convince some censorious earlier self – perhaps Cherie is the custodian – that he still hates the Tories. If IDS is still the leader at the next election, Tony Blair will have the chance to prove it.

Back in 1997, John Major decided on a long election campaign in the hope that Tony Blair would crack. In those days, the Tories still used to underestimate Mr Blair as a politician. Next time, Mr Blair might decide to return the compliment and have a five-week election, in the expectation that this would give IDS the opportunity to make some hideous mistakes, no doubt attracting criticism from his own party and driving the Tory campaign off the road and into the ditch. I wonder if as many as 10 per cent of Tory MPs would regard that as an unduly pessimistic scenario.

If those were Mr Blair's tactics, Charles Kennedy would be the beneficiary. That would be monstrously unfair. IDS may have his failings, but his fingernail clippings have more political substance than Charles Kennedy's brain. Talk about potential premiers: Mr Kennedy is not even as serious a figure as Ken Livingstone.

But politics has never been fair. At the next election, the Tory leader and Charles Kennedy will be judged by entirely different criteria. The Tory will have to run a marathon against Tony Blair, while Mr Kennedy mucks around in the egg and spoon race and is sweet to the mums and the vicar. He will spend the election trying to persuade the voters that he is leading the nice and the good party, and also the honest one. Those are preposterous claims, but will the voters find them so, as they are simultaneously repelled by Tony Blair's smarminess and Ian Duncan Smith's stumblings? It will assist Charles Kennedy that no one will take him seriously as a prime minister. Mr Kennedy can always flourish when no one takes him seriously. The Tory leader will not have that option.

At present, most Tory MPs are in a mood of long-term despair, alleviated by occasional spasms of complacency. The complacency emerges after a pleasant get-together, such as last weekend's, and is encouraged by the hope of bad economic news, the splits between Messrs Blair and Brown and continuing chaos in the public services. Some Tory MPs believe that all this could lift them off the bottom at the next election. As for winning an election, they seem to have forgotten that such a goal used to be attainable.

The despair comes from the certainty that they are stuck with the wrong leader, reinforced by the fear that another leadership election would make the party seem risible. But that is unnecessarily gloomy. The quickest way for any politician to get into trouble on the media is to go into intellectual contortions in order to deny what everyone else knows to be true. As everyone else knows that the Tory party has the wrong leader, a move to correct that would merely be seen as a necessary move back to electability.

What is needed now is 25 Tory MPs with the courage to sign up for a new leader and a better future.