Jay, you write that “David Cameron can do no right, by NRO’s lights.” I cannot speak for NRO as a whole, of course, but if that is the case, it should not be so. As you rightly say, his government has some solid achievements to its credit, notably in the areas of the economy and education. You are also quite right to mention that “the Conservatives are in the delicate position of governing in a coalition.” Indeed they are, and that fact has made things much more difficult for them than would have otherwise been the case. At the same time, we have to ask why there is a coalition. The answer to that awkward question is that Cameron threw away what should have been an okay lead going into the 2010 election, mainly (in my view) by missteps over (as always) the issue of the EU. You can disagree or agree with the positions Cameron has taken on the U.K.’s tortured relationship with the EU, but the fact remains that as a matter of pure politics he has played that tricky hand badly. And that, I’m afraid, is all too characteristic.

I’m often told that Cameron is a traditional Tory operator, not much of an ideologue but blessed with an instinctive feel for power. If only that were true. He may not be much of an ideologue (we could debate that), but, for a man who has got as far as he has, he sometimes shows remarkably little in the way of political skill. He has repeatedly been outplayed by the EU’s leadership, he was outmaneuvered by the Scots, he threw away that clear lead in 2010 and he has allowed a space to open up on the right that has now been filled by UKIP, something that will almost certainly sink the Tories at the next election. He has, by all accounts, antagonized much of his parliamentary party by a combination of high-handedness and neglect, and as for how he is seen by the local Conservative associations on which electoral success ultimately depends, well . . .

Cameron was correct, in the early days of his Tory leadership, to argue that the Conservative Party needed ‘modernization’ (Britain is what it is: as you put it, the country “is not bursting with Thatcherites”), but his critical mistake was to fail to appreciate the implications of the fact that politics are always in flux: over time modernization needed modernizing. And he failed to keep up. His wasteful and expensive greenery might have played well in 2006, but did not in the harder times that followed the financial crisis. De-emphasizing “Europe” might have made some sort of sense (at least politically) in 2006, but it did not after the Lisbon Treaty extended the reach of Brussels even deeper into the governance of the UK and, even more so, the euro crisis began to unfold. And then there’s immigration, a topic on which the Cameron of 2006 did not like to dwell. But it has not gone away as an issue. And nor has the sense that Britain has lost control of its borders, a sense sharpened by the fact that, so far (at least) as migrants from the EU are concerned, it happens to be true, a connection that UKIP has exploited to devastating effect.

As for UKIP, well, again I cannot speak for anyone else around here, but I think that one has to recognize both the party’s flaws and its achievement. Like most outsider parties it has its share of oddballs. Its policies are, not infrequently, more a matter of mood music than carefully thought-through program. Farage himself described his party’s 2010 manifesto as ”drivel”. A very convincing case can be made that UKIP has been successful in demonstrating why Britain should leave the EU but not (realistically) how, a failure that may end up torpedoing the chances of a Brexit. At the same time, UKIP has, against all odds, managed to change the political agenda in Britain — most notably by applying the pressure that led to the promise of an EU referendum — in a way that would have been impossible from within the Tory party. There is also the fact that UKIP appears to be doing what the Conservatives have been failing to do: attract the working class voters without which any party will struggle to win power. The tragedy, of course, is that UKIP’s success may, by dividing the right, scupper its chances in the 2015 election and let Labour in. That will not be good news. Those who believe (as some in UKIP claim to do) that David Cameron and Ed Miliband are indistinguishable are very, very wrong.

So what to do? Best guess is that it will involve tactical voting, but that’s a discussion for another day.

And now back to Scotland . . .