‘There is one thing you can be sure of with the Conservative party, before anything else – they have a grand sense of where the votes are,’ suggested Enoch Powell at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity in 1981. Over the past two decades that sense appears to have deserted the party. It is 22 years since it last won a parliamentary majority. In 2010, the inchoate nature of the Tory modernisation project ensured that the Conservatives were forced into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, having failed to decisively beat an unpopular, exhausted government which had presided over the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Since 2010, the hopes of Tory moderates – to use the coalition to complete the detoxification of the Conservative brand – have been largely frustrated.

Long-term trends do not bode well for the party, either. When the Conservatives returned to office in 1979, they won 22 seats in Scotland. Since 1997, they have never been able to win more than a solitary seat. The Tories’ problems in Scotland now seem to have spread south. In 2010, they won 43 seats in the three northern regions of England. While this was up from their nadir of 17 in 1997 and 2001, the Tories still managed to win fewer seats in the north in 2010 than they did during the Labour landslides of 1945 and 1966. As Peter Kellner of YouGov has suggested: ‘They lost Scotland because they lost their reputation as a unionist party and came to be seen as an English party. They are losing the north because they are seen increasingly as a southern party.’

Large numbers of Britain’s ethnic minority voters also appear deeply antipathetic towards the party. In 2010, the Tories managed to win just 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote. The Conservative peer-turned-pollster Michael Ashcroft has documented the political cost to the Tory party, suggesting: ‘We will find it increasingly difficult to win a majority without them.’ Finally, there is some evidence to indicate that the Conservatives’ historical advantage among women voters – which underpinned the election of Tory governments between 1945 and 1974 – may have been lost. Eradicated by New Labour after 1997, the gender gap now appears to be moving to Labour’s advantage. Since 2010, women have swung towards the party in bigger numbers than have men.

While the Conservative brand remains deeply flawed, the character of the party also appears to have changed in ways which work to its political detriment. ‘Above all no programme,’ Benjamin Disraeli admonished the editor of a new Tory magazine 150 years ago. For decades, the Conservatives’ pragmatism, their capacity for reinvention and ability to adjust to social changes which they had previously fiercely opposed, underlay their electoral success. Today, as Tim Bale outlines on page 14, the party has become altogether more ideological: its ‘mainstream majority,’ he notes, ‘is no longer that mainstream, at least relative to the electorate as a whole’.

For the first time ever, the Conservatives also face, in the shape of the United Kingdom Independence party, a serious challenge from their right flank. Add to this the slump in its membership – which is believed to have halved since 2005 – and the fact that the Tory core vote is increasingly concentrated among an elderly, socially conservative minority, and the party’s future prospects look less than rosy.

It would, however, be foolhardy for Labour to treat the Conservatives as a busted flush, incapable of winning a majority in 2015. An examination of the polls 16 months before election day during previous Conservative governments, for instance, suggests that Labour’s current lead may not be robust enough to ensure victory in May 2015, although the dynamics of a fixed-term parliament and coalition government make past precedents a less accurate guide to future elections than in the past.

Nonetheless, dig beneath the polls’ headline figures and there are some deeply worrying findings for Labour. Ashcroft’s January poll of 8,053 voters found that 15 per cent of those currently intending to vote Labour trust the Tories more on the economy; one in four trust them more on cutting the deficit and on immigration; 19 per cent trust them more on crime; and nearly one in three trust them more on reforming welfare. These are important vulnerabilities that Labour must expect the Tories to exploit ruthlessly between now and May 2015.

This May’s European elections are likely to see another big boost for Ukip and more Labour hand-rubbing at the prospect of a split rightwing vote at the general election. But even here a note of caution should be sounded. When offered a ‘forced choice’, where voters are asked to choose between a Labour or a Tory government, there is a virtual draw between the two main parties. Ashcroft’s poll also indicates that nearly two in three Ukip voters who say they are dissatisfied with Cameron still say they would prefer him to Ed Miliband as prime minister.

Finally, the Tories’ difficulties in the north of England make their chances of winning a majority more difficult but not impossible. As Kellner suggests: ‘There are enough constituencies in the Midlands and the south which, when added to the Tories’ isolated seats in the north, can give them a parliamentary majority.’

Four consecutive Conservative leaders have been unable to win a majority in the Commons. With Ukip snapping at their heels and many young, urban and northern Britons instinctively hostile to them, the Tories’ chances of doing so next year look poor. However, during the depths of their unpopularity, Tony Blair frequently reminded the Labour party that the Tories were sleeping, not dead. It is a lesson well worth Labour reminding itself of.