The Tories’ 2 May electoral disaster – the loss of almost 400 council seats, ten councils, the high-profile West Midlands mayor, the Blackpool South by-election and a worse London defeat than at the previous election – was even more humiliating than expected. It risks triggering a rebellion to try yet another prime minister. Sunak’s probably been saved for the moment only because in Blackpool Richard Tice’s Reform UK party fell just 117 votes short of beating the Tories and coming second to Labour.

It’s not hard to fathom why so many former Tory supporters have given up on the party. On many issues the Conservatives have become indistinguishable from Labour or the Liberal Democrats. They’ve delivered the highest taxes since Clement Attlee, have done nothing to stop the left’s march through the institutions and have shared Labour’s enthusiasm for mass immigration and Green zealotry. They went along with the Covid lockdown and masks madness and have almost without exception capitulated to the left in the culture wars. James Bond’s boss, the MI6 chief, these days announces his pronouns on X – in case anyone should wonder if Richard Moore is in fact a woman.

However it’s a mistake to claim that a Labour government would be hardly different. For a start, on one major culture war area of battle, transgender rights, a Tory-Labour fault line has opened up. Not so long ago prime minister Theresa May capitulated to the transgender extremists by supporting legal recognition of gender based only on self-identification. In the end that didn’t happen but the Tories established a permissive atmosphere for transgender ideologues in the NHS and schools. Two ministers – Victoria Atkins, Secretary of State for Health, and Kemi Badenoch, Minister for Women and Equalities – deserve the credit for rolling things back. The government has accepted the recommendations of the Hilary Cass review, which expressed deep concern about the recent epidemic of gender reassignment. Puberty-blockers are no longer to be routinely prescribed by the NHS. And new schools guidance will insist parents be consulted on any decisions concerning their children’s gender. The government is also taking action to ensure patients can be given treatment in single-sex hospital wards based on biological sex.

Meanwhile for the British left, radical transgender ideology remains a key piety.  Indeed, Humza Yousaf’s SNP-led government has just become probably the first in the world to collapse over transgender issues after his former Green coalition allies (headed by their two non-binary leaders) were furious that Yousaf was prepared, like England, to implement the findings of the Cass Review and restrict puberty-blockers.

Important Tory-Labour differences also exist on other key issues, even if they’re not as obvious. On immigration, the Conservatives have of course been hopeless. The impressive former home secretary Suella Braverman, one of the Tories’ few properly conservative MPs, has recounted how she spent a year trying to get a meeting with Sunak to highlight the unsustainability of soaring legal immigration, which reached a net 745,000 in 2022. He just wasn’t interested, she says. On illegal immigration, the Tories could have saved themselves much grief by putting Tony Abbott, whom they appointed as a trade advisor, in charge of stopping the boats.

Instead their efforts flounder amid farce.  Because the UK doesn’t detain illegal immigrants, half those due for deportation to offshore processing in Rwanda can’t be found.  Many have slipped across the open border into Ireland. In desperation, the authorities are offering £3,000 each to those willing to go. And even though the law is now in place allowing flights, the government won’t do anything for twelve weeks to allow time for appeals against deportation. Meanwhile an all-time record 7,567 illegal immigrants arrived in the first four months of this year, mostly involving a co-operative team effort by the UK ‘Border Force’, the French Navy and the people smugglers. Labour would be worse. Since Tony Blair, his party’s instincts have been that the more non-European immigration, the merrier for its political prospects.

Again, although the Tories have provided a master class in climate catastrophism, Labour would be even more extreme. It’s threatening to block new North Sea oil and gas production completely which would mean replacing it with imports and the loss of 100,000 jobs. Labour also wants to bring the deadline for banning the sale of new non-electric cars back from Sunak’s 2035 to Johnson’s 2030. (Labour wants to realign with Brussels but doesn’t seem to be aware that its beloved EU last year junked this type of extremism and decided to allow sales of new internal combustion cars indefinitely from 2035 if they run on synthetic fuels.)

Conservative voters haven’t noticed or no longer care that Labour would be more of a disaster than the Tories on issues important to them. But as the party’s panic sets in, Sunak enters danger territory. Almost certainly the Tories face oblivion under his leadership, but many MPs appear to have entered fantasy land thinking that ex-defence minister Penny Mordaunt, famous for saying ‘trans women are women’, could come to their rescue. A new genuinely conservative leader – Braverman, Jenrick, Frost or Badenoch – combined with stealing Reform UK’s policies might make a difference. But the wet majority of Tory MPs wouldn’t allow it.

Yet not everything is going Labour’s way. Because of anger over Labour’s initial refusal to support a Gaza ceasefire, Muslim voters have proved less loyal than hoped. This has cost Labour tens of thousands of votes and a council, Oldham. And not all opinion polls are forecasting a Blair-like landslide. UK Sky News polling, extrapolating projections from local election results, shows a much narrower lead than most, meaning Labour beating the Tories but falling short of a majority, therefore probably needing a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Against that is the fact that Reform UK candidates didn’t run in most of the local election contests. They will in the general election. The Blackpool result shows the party surging, even without Nigel Farage at the helm. After Farage’s key role in delivering the Brexit vote in 2016, the Conservatives should have invited him into the tent, making him a peer and a cabinet minister. Instead, they treated him like a pariah. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.