"It's a pity they can't both lose" - well, in Eastleigh, they both did!

How’s all that “gay marriage”, pro-EU, non-nasty, warmly inclusive, modern Toryism workin’ out fer ya, Dave? Well, in 2010 the new-look, limp-wristed, kissy-kissy, don’t-frighten-the-horses, anti-Thatcher, Blairite, Obama-worshipping, left-of-centre, all-thing-to-all-liberals Cameron/Maude Tory Party couldn’t defeat a Labour Prime Minister who was clearly off with fairies.

Yesterday, despite the LibDems doing everything in their power to prove themselves to be what sensible people have always known they were – i.e. a bunch of deeply creepy losers and incompetents – Cameron’s Conservatives couldn’t even beat Clegg’s army of calamitous crapheads in a by-election that was there for the taking.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, and despite promising us yet another phony referendum on EU membership, they came third behind what Cameron memorably described as a party of "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists".  What makes this all so satisfying is that UKIP is essentially the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party in exile, and it was Cameron and his arrogant cohorts who banished them from Tory kingdom.

Far be it from me to gloat, but…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

…and Har Har, Guffaw, Chuckle, Snort, Chortle, Tee Hee, Titter, Yuck, Snigger, Howl, Giggle, Snicker, Crow and Cackle as well. And Roar, of course.

And did I mention Gloating? Oh yes, so I did.

As I said, far be it from me to gloat, but it would take a bigger man than I to resist the temptation to point out the chickens coming home to roost, let alone the tanks of middle class Middle England massing on Cameron’s front lawn. And where exactly are the army of Labour and LibDem defectors that were supposed to be arriving around now to shore up the Notting Hill Junta’s tenuous defences?

It takes some kind of King Midas in Reverse to dream up policies that alienate a party’s core voters while failing to attract a single new supporter. But Cameron – with his gay marriage, climate change and foreign aid obsessions – has managed to turn gold into lead.

And there’s really no point giving us the old one about governments inevitably taking a bit of a hammering half-way through a parliament. Because the party that won the by-election is part of the coalition government. The truth is that Cameron is the Rab Butler of his day – a Liberal at heart, an instinctive appeaser, suited by background and temperament to manage decline rather than to engineer success by force of personality and conviction. He has no vision – at least, none that any of us can discern – and right now, we need someone with what George Bush Sr dismissively termed “the vision thing”.

Of course, I wouldn’t be saying any of this if that watery-eyed weakling Osborne was doing what every Thatcherite knows he should be doing – i.e. implementing deep spending cuts in order to pay back Britain’s trillion pound debt, instead of maxing out the national credit card in order not to have to take any really difficult choices. Of course, that would make the Tories even more unpopular than they are now and they’d probably still have gone on to lose in 2015 – but at least they’d lose for doing the right thing, and it would be the British people who’d be guilty of a lack of moral fibre rather than the Tory Party leadership.

As if last night’s result wasn’t already funny enough, there was the embarrassment for Labour of coming a dismal fourth. Henry Kissinger memorably said of the two sides in the Iran-Iraq war “It’s a pity they can’t both lose”. Well, last night, they both lost. Excellent!