Polls don’t matter, after all. Nick Clegg – still about as popular as leprosy on a nudist beach – now looks a certainty to lead his party to the next election while David Cameron – the Conservatives’ best weapon, despite everything – might not.

In fact, it’s easy to imagine a situation in which Clegg continues on in government for the rest of the decade, perhaps longer, while Cameron spends a long retirement on the lecture circuit.

How can this be? The difference is that the Liberal Democrats live in the real world while the Tories are increasingly reality-challenged. While they might not have the numbers on their side – and, for all the hold of Eastleigh has been greeted like the relief of Mafeking, they will not be able to leverage the power of super-incumbency and the entirety of their activist base on to 57 seats at the same time in 2015 – the Liberal Democrats do have the facts on their side. The facts are these: that the Conservatives were the largest party, that there simply weren’t the votes to make a ‘rainbow coalition’ work.

Most importantly, they know it is a better government for its Liberal Democrat element. Yes, their achievements are largely negative, but they are achievements nonetheless. Come 2015, they will be able to make the case that they have moderated the Conservatives. The last fortnight has shown, for Labour, any path to power that depends on attacking the Liberal Democrats as ‘collaborators’ will not work. The case against them isn’t that they are collaborators: it’s that a vote for one of the big two is a vote about deciding the direction of the country, a vote for the third party is a vote to have some people negotiate with some other people about the direction of the country.

The trick, then, is to have a compelling vision for the direction of the country, but Labour’s problem is that, while it might have a concept, it doesn’t have an album. At present it has a hit single in restoring the 10p tax and a poorly conceived cover in the immigration cap.

That leaves Labour badly exposed, both to the Liberal Democrats, but also to a resurgent Conservative party, who will surely grow tired of putting the ball into their own net this year. There is a mystifying debate as to whether or not Labour’s lead is ‘soft’: in 2010, Labour got 28 per cent of the vote. It now averages around 40 per cent in the polls: if a third of your voters didn’t vote for you as recently as three years ago, it’s safe to say they might not vote for you in two years’ time.

What might Labour’s album sound like? In the Purple Papers, Labour has what should become the foundational text of a Miliband administration. That requires a culture change for Labour; which, for a socialist party, has a remarkable tendency to treat the state as an instrument only for resolving crises. In public health, that displays itself in a willingness to use the NHS to solve problems expensively, instead of using social care to solve them quickly and cheaply. That would then be coupled with policies that drove down the cost of living: from commuter fares to utility bills to rent.

That’s one way forward for Labour, at least. I saw the other, too, on display a few weeks ago: not in a policy pamphlet but at the National Theatre. This House is the enthralling story of a Labour government that gained a partial and limited triumph at the expense of a failed Tory administration, and lurched from crisis to crisis without ever tackling the big pressing problems of the time, having failed to seal the deal with its own voters at the polls and without a mandate for any sort of action. The Conservatives were never really defeated: merely delayed. History doesn’t have to repeat itself.

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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb