In his latest column, Mark Littlewood, Director of Popular Conservatism, says that the Conservative Party doesn’t have a great deal of time to dust itself down and get back on its feet. It’s not just a matter of “more hard graft” to achieve this. A whole new strategy will have to be developed and rapidly implemented.

I’m no scientist, but my broad understanding of momentum is that when you have it, it's easy (indeed inevitable) for you to move forward and when you don’t have it, it isn’t.

Commentators are often prone to claiming that in politics, momentum is everything. That’s obviously not entirely true, but it may contain more than an element of wisdom.

Since the bloodbath of the local elections for the Conservatives and the breakthrough for Reform, the momentum theory appears to be holding up pretty well.

The most recent opinion poll I have seen puts Reform in a clear lead at 33% and the Conservatives falling away at just 16%, a single percentage point ahead of the Liberal Democrats.

If we see these sorts of numbers persisting, we clearly are no longer in the scenario of Labour, Reform and the Tories all bunched together within the margin of error. In fact, that latest survey of voting intention implies a Reform landslide in a general election with the Liberal Democrats forming the official opposition. Labour would be reduced to well under 100 seats and the Conservatives would hold just 17. One wag put it to me that two party politics is alive and well, it’s just that the two parties are Reform and the LibDems rather than Labour and the Tories.

Things can change fast in politics. Back in 2019, the Conservatives went from winning just 9% in the nationwide Euro elections to securing a landslide barely six months later.

However, the prevailing state of public opinion changes the day-to-day narrative in politics, which in turn can have an impact in shifting public opinion.

One fox that appears to have been shot is the Conservative claim that a vote for Reform is wasted because it simply let’s Labour win more seats. That was true in a lot of seats at the last general election, but it is now far from a universal truth. Indeed, in many areas, the exact opposite is the case. Had Reform narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election rather than winning it by a whisker it is likely that the mere presence of a Conservative on the ballot paper would have caused a Labour victory.

All this means that a repetition of the Tory line that Reform are merely an irritation, distraction and annoyance will sound utterly ludicrous in the current climate.

On the flipside, more and different questions will now be put to Reform. If Nigel Farage does currently appear to be on track to be Prime Minister, who would he pick to serve in his Cabinet? Will Reform now appoint official spokespeople to cover a raft of key policy areas? Would their current operational model be able to adapt to that more collegiate way of working?

What is clear to me is that the Conservative Party doesn’t have a great deal of time to dust itself down and get back on its feet. It’s not just a matter of “more hard graft” to achieve this. A whole new strategy will have to be developed and rapidly implemented. If poll ratings remain on the floor for any political party then decay can kick in fast. Activists drift away, councillors lose their seats, fewer high calibre people step up to become Parliamentary candidates.  If you can’t arrest decline, at some point you enter a death spiral.

These are exciting and unpredictable times for British politics, but also unquestionably they are the most perilous times for the Conservative Party that we have seen in our lifetimes.

Keep the flag of freedom flying.