In local elections across the country they are contesting seats last contested at a time of maximum unpopularity of the old Conservative government. They are bound to win quite a large number of seats.
In Wales and Scotland where proportional representation is being used for the vote for the local assemblies, for the first time, they have a chance of winning at least some seats, instead of having no representation at all.
So although in all these cases they start from a base that in extremely low, they should have been able to look forward to some favourable headlines.
All the stranger that just before these contests, splits and anxieties have cut through the party. The difficulties are not just superficial. They reflect the fact that the British Tories are now in a political cul-de-sac.
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What has happened? Hague, after receiving the endorsement of Mrs Thatcher at the time of the leadership election, has been emphasising the depth of the Conservative Party's general election defeat. He and a number of other thinkers have been emphasising new constituencies. A few months ago, his rival, Michael Portillo, waiting in the wings till he can return to Parliament in a bye election, said that the Conservative Party had to be able to attract the votes of people who work in the state sector like teachers and doctors.
Within the last week, Peter Lilley, the deputy leader, drafted a speech that emphasising that the Conservative Party recognised that health and education had mainly to be paid for by central taxation, and could only be supplemented by private initiatives. The spin doctors heralded it as a break with Thatcherism. But the draft was watered down after what appears to have been strong disputes in the shadow cabinet.
Yet at the weekend the shadow chancellor, Francis Maude, declared that the Conservatives would maintain and match the increased state funding that the Labour government had allocated to health and education.
Today the headlines are on the one hand that a senior official at Conservative head office has been sacked for leaking the first draft of the Lilley speech, and tonight Hague has given a speech mentioning Thatcher warmly and all other participants who are jostling for the direction of the future party.
The leftists are welcoming the move towards a broader political strategy, but wish Hague could be more flexible about his little Englander policy towards the European Union. The right are incensed.
Hague has little personal support now, and strategists are being to calculate that Blair might go to another general election in a couple of years rather than in three years (the UK prime minister has the discretion of choosing the timing so long as it is within 5 years of the last). Assuming that NATO has won a victory of sorts over the wastelands of Yugoslavia, that the UK economy has bottomed out and is rising a little, that the regional assemblies for Wales and Scotland settle down, and the message gets across about lower mortgage rates and higher spending on health and education, then Blair could consolidate his victory. Once re-elected he could call a referendum on Europe and campaign for British entry.
So if the Tories are going to get rid of Hague, they need to do so in the next few months. However it is such a tricky job at the moment they are no obvious immediate contenders.
Why are the fundamentals so bad? I suggest that Thatcherism was really a corrective. It was a campaign to cut the social wage at a time of increased international competition, and to deregulate, to intensify the exploitation of labour. But this narrowed the scope of the party from the broad pragmatic party of British capitalism. It is now firmly committed to an anti-Europe line, which is relatively popular among small capitalist enterprises, but is in the minority among the biggest capitalists. So the Tories are off-message with capital. And the population sense this. Labour is the better government for managing advanced monopoly capitalism, and winning popular support for it.
The Third Way has a wide class base, that is inherently stable now. The class base of the Conservative Party has become narrow and reactionary. The attempts to modernise it with its own focus groups merely show up the contradictions more sharply.
Chris Burford
London