Everyone knows that the Harry Potter books went downhill once Voldemort came back to life: the first four were a series of charming and engaging tales; but once the Big Bad actually showed up, he was but a pale imitation of the great wizard we’d all heard so much about, too easily beaten by his opponent.

And so it is with David Cameron’s Conservatives. I thought the Conservative party was meant to be a ruthless election-winning machine. Their history is one of audacious and unexpected resurrections and triumphs against the odds. They’ve reinvented themselves time and time again, coming back from political defeats that would have reduced other parties to dust. They are, don’t forget, the most successful political party in the democratic world.

What happened? George Osborne attacks the unemployed for scrounging off the state; and then tries to blag a first-class seat with a second-class ticket. Andrew Mitchell is moved from DFID to the whips’ office to steady the ship: and almost immediately triggers a political crisis. Jeremy Hunt fails at culture and then goes to the Department of Health to wax lyrical about a woman’s right to choose.  For the price of an entirely superficial and largely ornamental reform to the House of Lords, Cameron could have had a majority within reach: and yet he allowed his backbenchers to doom his party’s hopes of forming a government in 2015. Is this really how the natural party of government behaves?

Barring an act of unforgivable self-immolation from the Labour leadership, ‘Cameroonism’ will be a strictly one-term proposition. That’s astonishing: of the four prime ministers not to win a second term in power, three of them – Douglas-Home, Callaghan, and Brown – were coming off the back of a long period in government, and one of them was Edward Heath. Labour finished closer to third than first in 2010: 2015 was always Cameron’s election to lose. Where did it all go wrong?

After the 1992 election, Michael Heseltine was asked if Labour could ever win an election again. ‘Labour,’ he responded, ‘will win when it wants to’. The Labour movement’s will to win may not yet fully have returned, but I’m beginning to doubt that the Conservatives ever really wanted to govern. People say that their deficit reduction programme is ‘ideological’, but that’s not it at all. The government’s deficit timetable isn’t based or philosophy or economics, but politics: they think that the only way to win is to offer a tax cut in 2015, so they’ve sacrificed everything in order to deliver that. The problem isn’t that Osborne is a mad neo-Thatcherite; the problem is that Osborne is more interested in running CCHQ than Britain PLC. I don’t believe that the Cameron we were sold at the last election was an entirely false one. But I do believe that, given the choice between his political preferences and mere survival, Cameron will choose his backbenchers every time.

That is good news for Labour – the most damaging blows to the Conservatives have been self-inflicted – but it also raises a difficult question: are we any different? The leadership has quietly committed to a programme of austerity almost as painful as that enacted by the coalition, but the grassroots still talk about an end to austerity and a nebulous plan for ‘growth’; something which is easy to talk about but hard to create.  Across Europe, social democratic parties that have made their way back into government are being confronted with a series of tough and unpleasant choices. The price of government may well be extinction. It’s not yet clear whether or not we’re willing to pay that price.

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

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Photo: Florrie Bassingbourn