The Tory party’s manifesto reads like they’ve forgotten they caused this mess in the first place

If you are not leaping for joy at the prospect of five more years living in a fleshy fever dream from the haunted coal hole of the Conservative psyche, you have to admit – the polls don’t look great.

Yes I know, opinion polls come with health warnings. The seat-by-seat data suggests it’s not as good as it looks for the Tories. We don’t yet know how tactical voters will be. Remember 2015, remember 2016, remember 2017...

Nevertheless. According to the Britain Elects poll aggregator, the Conservatives are averaging a 42.4 per cent vote share against Labour’s 29.6 per cent. (The Liberal Democrats are on 14.7 per cent, Nigel Farage’s Conservative B-Team are on 4.6 per cent, with the Greens on 3.3 per cent). Crunch all that and we could be looking at a 40-plus Tory majority come 13 December. Labour’s vision of free broadband for all, a four-day week and a genuinely transformed Britain would be filed under “what if?”.

Whichever way you slice it, that’s a lot of people who are happy with things as they are. Or if not happy – we are all complicated people – then sanguine, or resigned, or terrified of Jeremy Corbyn, or just hopeful that this time it will be different, because I don’t think even the most dyed-in-the-wool Tory would pretend to be delighted with the state of Britain in 2019.

But still, it seems a surprisingly large number of us are unwilling or unable to make the link between the fact that the Tories have been in power since 2010, and in that time the NHS has become a rolling crisis; schools are now meekly begging parents for cash donations to fund basic supplies; homelessness is at record levels; parliament is screaming; the union is splintering; barefaced lies are now an established part of political discourse; region is set against region; generation against generation; family member against family member.

Indeed, sometimes, it seems the people who are most angry at what the Conservatives have wrought are the Conservatives themselves.

Which is what makes the Get Brexit Done manifesto such a weird and warped document. It conveniently ignores the fact that the acute problems to which it offers unconvincing solutions – the NHS, social care, education, Brexit – are all the result of decisions made by the Conservative Party. Perhaps not precisely the same people, but the same basic entity. The Conservatives demand the right to be scoopers and poopers.

And fair play to their strategists, if it works: by 2024, we will have had 14 years of consecutive Tory rule, more one-party nation than one-nation party. The problem is, one-party nations usually rely on a carefully wrought infrastructure of lies and untruths, and in the absence of any compelling vision for the country, it is lies and untruths that Conservatives have chosen to push.

I doubt that George Osborne and Priti Patel would have much to admire in one another, but I was struck by a parallel this week. The home secretary, visiting a food bank in Barrow, had harsh words for anyone blaming their poverty on the people who had been controlling the economy for the past nine years. “Everybody just says it’s the government ... well, it’s not.” she huffed. It’s “parts of society and the structures. Local authorities have a role to play, education, public services, which are locally led and locally run.” And have been subject to a 40 per cent funding cut under her party’s rule.

It is striking, when you look over the recent history of the Conservatives, how all the most successful figures are not reformers or social visionaries, in the mould of a Thatcher or Macmillan. They are spinners, storytellers, manipulators. Future scholars will pick apart Iain Duncan Smith’s universal credit fiasco or Andrew Lansley’s NHS calamity only as cautionary examples; but Lynton Crosby’s dead cat strategy and Dominic Cummings’ misinformation campaigns have already entered the textbooks. Likewise, Osborne’s reputation came not from his record as chancellor of the exchequer, but from his political shrewdness. His grand fib was that it was Labour’s overspending that caused the global economy to collapse has proved wildly successful for the Tories; his “skivers vs strivers” narrative helped to turn communities against themselves and proved a short-term doorstep win.

But here’s the thing. Lies have consequences. Not immediately. But someday you get found out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is often invoked to warn of the dangers of socialism, but it seems to me his warnings about political lies are just as pertinent the other way around.

“In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the state,” he said of the Soviet Union. “In breaking with the lie we are performing a moral act, not a political one, not one that can be punished by criminal law, but one that would immediately have an effect on our way of life.”

As for Boris Johnson, even his most ardent supporters would be forced to concede that truth is not a strong point – he was fired from The Times for lying; he can’t even be honest about how many children he has fathered; he lies again and again, £350m for the NHS, 40 new hospitals. But actually, it also explains why he was such a popular choice to become Conservative leader. He’s just the best liar. The rebranding of the official Conservative Twitter account as a neutral fact-check service during the leaders’ debate was a calculated lie. But Johnson offers something even better. He’s a virtuoso liar. He doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. It comes naturally to him.

But the truth, eventually, will out.