I’ve long been puzzled by how relaxed Britain’s Conservative Party has seemed in the face of polling numbers that have pointed to their defeat, not for months, but years.

That may now be changing, but the implication of what Iain Martin has to say in a new article in the Daily Telegraph is that the Tories still don’t have what it takes to turn things round. As background, he notes that UKIP’s support appears to be fading somewhat (the opinion polls are not consistent, but the broad trend appears clear), but then adds (my emphasis added):

[I]t would be foolish in the extreme to dismiss [Ukip’s] prospects next month. Despite all predictions to the contrary, and years of mockery from the metropolitan media, Ukip is still in there fighting – and on the verge of doing something extraordinary that could decide the fate of the Conservative Party and the country in a few weeks’ time.
A large win – in terms of seats – was never likely and it was never the point, because the party’s support is thinly spread in too many areas. And the first-past-the-post system favours the Tories and Labour, at least in England.
Indeed, the central question was always where, exactly, the party would land on election day in terms of share of the vote. Even the 3.1 per cent it secured in 2010 amounted to more than 900,000 votes. If Ukip “slides” from its current level of polling in the teens to somewhere in the region of 9 per cent, it will still have amassed almost three million votes, drawn disproportionately from former members of the Tory tribe.
And for all the talk of a slide, in the 27 opinion polls published between April 1 and April 10, the party recorded an average share of 14.6 per cent. This is not where the party’s critics expected it to be this close to an election.
The hope in Tory headquarters is that in the end this will not matter, as so much will come down to individual constituencies in this madcap election. This weekend, campaign chiefs say they detect the beginnings of a squeeze on Ukip in seats where voters are aware that there is a fight in which their vote will make a difference.
We will see, but when nervous Tories wonder where the missing millions of votes are, and when they are going to turn up, they should reflect on the fact that they have the Cameroons to thank for this mess.
Their decision many years ago to be so rude about Ukip and the party’s supporters, to win over metropolitan opinion, turns out to have been a potentially extremely costly mistake that stands as the worst manifestation of a massive misjudgment made by the Tory modernisers.
Rather than locking in the core vote, and then building out into floating voter land, growing a coalition of interests in the manner that has worked for other leaders of the Right internationally, the Cameroons attempted to define themselves in colourful terms against a large portion of their traditional vote.
What’s done is done, and last week the Prime Minister attempted, with a straight face, to win back some of those people. It was time, he said, “to come home”. Not only was the PM the wrong messenger, as he is now hated by many Ukip voters, he sounded somewhat patronising. Look, he seemed to be saying to Ukippers, you’ve had your fun. A joke’s a joke. But this is serious. I could be out of No 10 within weeks. It’s time for you to stop being silly.
On hearing Mr Cameron’s plea, many Ukip supporters will have blown a raspberry, or worse, at the television.

Understandably so. For Cameron to make this plea is evidence yet again of just how tone-deaf the Tory hierarchy has become (it would have been far better to deploy someone like Owen Paterson, a politician with, not so coincidentally, the most credible approach to Brexit, a politician, not so coincidentally, fired by Cameron from his ministerial job). That so many Conservative voters have left the fold has been a tragedy for the right, but it is a tragedy for which the Conservative leadership must take the lion’s share of the blame.

Nevertheless, with the potentially nation-breaking (or making, take your pick) surge by the Scottish National Party showing no signs of abating, and Ed Milliband’s Labour Party shifting even further left, the stakes in this election are far higher than usual.

As for what the UKIP-inclined should do, I can only repeat, well, my advice from December:

[V]ote UKIP in the few seats where UKIP has a real chance of winning and in the many where the Conservatives have no hope of prevailing. Elsewhere, vote Conservative.