Howard rictus turns into a genuine beam

Michael Howard came into his Folkestone count this morning with the smile of a man reprieved from political death, if perhaps only by a hung jury. Yesterday afternoon the obituaries had been set in type. The rivals were circling. The sketchwriters were already preparing amusing pieces involving an earlymorning departure from the nearby ferry terminal.

But, after the roller-coaster night of Election 2005, it is perhaps now even possible that Mr Howard can outlast Tony Blair as a party leader, if he so chooses. "We're having a good night," murmured Mr Howard, as Tory gains cut the Prime Minister's majority very much to the lower end of expectations.

With two rows of baying cameramen and the BBC's Kirsty Wark arrayed in front of you, it is, of course, obligatory to place an expression denoting pleasure on your face. But this was not the Howard Rictus, familiar to us all from awkward interrogation sessions with Jeremy Paxman. This was the genuine Howard Beam, perhaps produced in the knowledge that your own majority in this Liberal Democrat "decapitation" target seat has almost doubled and you

will have about 40 more MPs to share your benches with.

He'd been in his constituency home near the village of Lympne until almost

3.30am, emerging at the count a few minutes before his own result was declared. But the atmosphere, aides told us, got "lighter and lighter" as the Tory gains started to come in.

The election, said Mr Howard, was a "fantastic" result for him personally, and a "real advance" towards his party's recovery. "Our task in the next parliament is to compete that recovery, and I'm sure it's a task which everyone in the Conservative Party will address with real relish," he said. A faint note, however, hung in the air that it might be a task that Mr Howard could choose to hand over to someone else.

In absolute terms, it wasn't a spectacular night at all for the Tories. Their share of the vote, a projected 33 per cent, was barely changed from

2001. Yet their failure to advance overall was partly hidden by a large pile of rubble representing the collapse of Labour's support. All over the country, and especially in London, the Tories did better than anyone expected in the seats where they actually needed to win. Something of a result, perhaps, for the Lynton Crosby-led, tightly targeted, hotbuttonissues campaign that Mr Howard waged.

The Lib-Dems' "decapitation strategy" did not succeed in inflicting more than a light haircut, with the loss of Tim Collins's Westmorland and Lonsdale being its only success of the night. But in Dorset West, Haltemprice and Maidenhead, Oliver Letwin, David Davis and Theresa May saw their majorities increased, not reduced, just like Mr Howard's. And the Tories actually succeeded in taking seats away from Charles Kennedy with victories in Newbury and Guildford.

Labour voters, too, contrary to all the conventional wisdom of the punditocracy, swung directly to the Tories, in places like Gravesham,

Putney, Peterborough, Shrewsbury and The Wrekin. Clearly, the dog whistle campaign had been heard. Perhaps it was so inaudible that even the voters refused to admit they'd heard it.

The spectacle of Peterborough's Labour MP Helen Clark, waiting through the tally of the Tories, the Lib-Dems and the Motorcycle News Party man to hear that she'd lost, felt, for a few minutes, like the Basildon moment - the time when you understand that previous certainties about a Labour victory had been swept away.

It was greeted with real excitement by the Tories in Folkestone's Leas Cliff Hall. But it proved a false prophet because there were many disappointments for the Tories, too.

Mr Howard himself said, early in the evening, that he would perform a clean sweep in his home county of Kent. In reality, he failed to take some of the most obvious Thames Estuary seats that you would expect him to win. Cheadle (Lib-Dem majority of only 33 votes) failed to fall even though the defending MP was too ill to campaign, or even appear at her reelection. At precisely 5am came the cruellest blow of the night. Dorset South, Labour majority 153, the Tories' number one target, actually registered a swing towards Tony Blair.

BUT Mr Howard had succeeded in seriously undermining the Prime Minister's inheritance, and launching a springboard, probably for some future Tory leader in 2009. It's the kind of result you could take any way - a sign of the Government's weakness and the Tories' failure to exploit it, or a much-betterthanexpected performance from an experienced political streetfighter.

"Are you thinking what we're thinking?" the Tories had asked the electorate. Last night, the electorate replied - not yes, not no, but "We're not really sure."