The omens were not good for the Tories from the first day of the campaign. An advance guard of four MPs arrived in Eastleigh buoyed by opinion polls which showed they could recapture the seat from the Lib Dems making it the first by-election victory of its kind for a governing party since 1982.
The MPs rang the intercom buzzer at campaign HQ to get into the first-floor office. And waited...and waited. There was no one in. So they walked into the town centre and passed the Lib Dem HQ on Eastleigh High Street.
The building was festooned with balloons, windows were plastered with posters of their candidate, and a constant procession of people was going in and out.
Mrs Hutchings was effectively gagged by her London media minders who feared she would stray off messageDuring the three-week campaign the Lib Dems ruthlessly exploited the fact that they hold every council ward in the constituency.
Armed with local knowledge and canvassing records, the Lib Dem volunteers ran a disciplined operation which focused on issues relevant to each neighbourhood.
Their strength mirrored the Tories’ weakness. The Tory association is moribund.
The leader of the four-strong Tory group on Eastleigh council (the Lib Dems have 42 councillors), Godfrey Olson, is 83.
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The campaign team, led by Stephen Gilbert, who is Mr Cameron’s political secretary, also made a serious error of judgment in the way they deployed their candidate, Maria Hutchings.
She was effectively gagged by her London media minders who feared she would stray off message.
Yet Mrs Hutchings was a candidate with a rare quality: authenticity.
Her outspoken opposition to gay marriage and hardline views on immigration and Europe may have jarred with the metropolitan cabal of advisers that surround the Prime Minister, but they would have played well on the Eastleigh doorstep and helped neuter Ukip.
Authenticity: Maria Hutchings had to be comforted after being pushed into a dismal third placeThere were practical problems too. The Tory computer system – the vital link between local associations, their electoral registers, their known supporters, and Tory HQ in London – crashed in the first week. At the Lib Dem HQ money flooded in every day with donors given a name check on the party website.
While Eastleigh was fleetingly mentioned on the main page of the Tory HQ website there was no by-election donations’ button. Every Tory MP was ordered to the constituency at least twice but they were ignorant of local issues.
All the early signs suggested a Tory victory was possible. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of Chris Huhne, a serial liar and philanderer. In the last ten days Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, has been engulfed by criticism of response to scandal surrounding Lord Rennard.
And, at the start of the week the Lib Dems slumped to a record low of eight points in a national opinion poll. Yet still the Tories could not win.
The inquest is already under way with one senior strategist saying: ‘For two years we knew that Huhne might have to resign so we… should have been crawling all over the constituency to make our presence felt. But we did nothing.’
The real significance of the result is the fact many more local Tory associations are in the same state as Eastleigh.
Party membership is plummeting but instead of trying to reconnect with his grassroots Mr Cameron antagonises them. By continuing to support higher spending on aid, threatening to build on the Green Belt and, most of all, by backing gay marriage, he is ensuring membership falls still further.
Eastleigh is the most graphic evidence to date that the Tory leadership has never been so divorced from its supporters.
