The Tories have lost a key seat, but don't write off Hague yet

The right could be more compassionate - and voters aren't fooled by Labour's vacuity either

Romsey! they cry. Romsey, for heaven's sake! If you had to invent a perfect Tory stronghold, says the psephologist Rob Waller, you'd come up with Romsey. When I shut my eyes and think of Rumsey (as I believe the locals call it), I see gymkhanas and leylandii-shaded tennis courts, and women in scarves with green waistcoats and Labradors and pearls and Volvo-fulls of mange-touts from Waitrose.

Romsey is the kind of place that marched en masse to save country pursuits, and curses the Government for the price of petrol, and is jolly fed up that the NHS hasn't improved, and thinks that the police need to get a grip on rural crime. And there they are, three years into a Labour government run by a load of smartypants Islington lawyers, who have spent most of the last three years axing the hereditary peers and bombing Kosovo and inventing Celtic parliaments; their long-serving Tory MP has died with his wife in tragic circumstances; they have in their ballot papers the perfect means of giving Tony Blair a long-overdue thwack on the mazzard.

And what do they do, these Hermÿs-wearing, Guerlain-wafting denizens of Trollopian tranquillity? They vote to kick out the Tory! Unbelievable. The Opposition has managed to lose a seat at a by-election for the first time since 1965, and the 50th safest Tory seat in the country, too! If the Lib Dems can take Romsey, where will the horrible yellow tide lap next?

Across the south of England, wherever the Liberal Democrats are getting stuck in with their termite-like opportunism, broad-beamed pin-striped Tories will be wondering whether their immemorial seats, passed on from Tory to Tory for decades, are about to crack and burst beneath them. And across Britain this morning the lefties and Hague-bashers and, I shouldn't wonder, a fair few readers of this fine newspaper will be cackling and jeering. "That'll teach you, Haguey baby," they'll be snorting. "That'll teach the Tories to wind everyone up with their stuff about asylum-seekers. Get out of the saloon bar, Hague, with your populist shoot-a-burglar-and-win-a-Metro claptrap. The people of Romsey have risen above your invitation to show their baser side."

We will be told that politics has changed since the 1980s, or even the 1990s, when there was still a market for a party mainly composedof hard-faced, criminal-bashing, sponger-opposed Eurosceptics. Get real, Hague, say the pundits. Learn the lessons of 1997. Britain has changed, Britain is better, Britain is nicer. And those who are inclined to read terrific significance into the Romsey result go on to point to the success of Steve Norris in coming second to Ken in the London mayoral race. Now Shagger, they say, he had the right idea. He reached out and touched. He overtly distanced himself from the "nastier" elements in the Tory party; and when London's million-strong (or whatever it is) Gay Lobby came to him and said, "Shagger, are you or are you not in favour of cruising on Hampstead Heath?", he said, "Whacko, cruise away, be my guest, and I'll have a special word with the Metropolitan Police, when I become mayor, and ensure that you will be allowed to cruise in peace." It was, says this school of thought, precisely because Shagger was "inclusive" and not divisive that he did so well, and that is why he received a stunning 564,137 votes - admittedly about 200,000 votes behind Ken, but nonetheless a credit to his strategy.

Learn from Romsey, learn from Norris, say the pundits in the Guardian and the Times. Hague must learn a new language of inclusiveness, we are told. And, you know what, I think there may be a grain of truth in the idea, though not much more than that. It is probably true that in seats like Romsey, and in Wokingham, where the Tories lost control of the council, people are now so rich that they want to feel extra virtuous, to feel good about themselves; and if a Tory comes along and starts going on about asylum-seekers, especially when Romsey is not exactly thronging with asylum-seekers, there may be a few hundred Tory households where people feel slightly put off. There is no doubt that Charlie Kennedy confronted the Tories directly on the issue, and it may be that some prosperous Tories actually switched to Lib Dem in a spasm of disapproval of Mr Hague.

I will go further, while in this mood of nicey-nicey political correctness. Perhaps it would be a good thing if the Tories did learn a new, additional vocabulary, with more stuff about caring and society. It wouldn't do much harm if William Hague made a speech explaining what the Conservatives have to offer to the poor, the sick and the old. Their record this century is far from shameful. But if you think the Tories lost Romsey because of Hague's new tough line on asylum and crime, and that his tactics were "rejected", you would be quite wrong. Nor was it all the fault of Tim Palmer, the candidate, and the fact that he went to Eton. In fact, the Tory vote held up pretty well, declining from 46 to 42 per cent. It was the Labour vote that collapsed, from 19 per cent to 4 per cent.

Oh yes, you will say, but that is because they were all voting tactically, to keep the Tory out; and maybe that is true, and maybe that will happen again at the General Election, and maybe it won't. But the key fact, the central point of Thursday night, was not the Tory defeat in Romsey. It was the total apathy that New Labour inspired in its grassroots supporters. Hague may have lost in Romsey, but he won nearly 600 council seats.

After three years of government, Blair's great strength - that he seemed to position himself in the ideal centre of politics - is turning into his weakness. He's neither one thing nor the other. Perhaps there were a few pained expressions on moderate Tory faces, behind the mullioned windows of Romsey, when Hague made his speech about the ludicrous murder verdict on Tony Martin; but I doubt there were very many of them, and in any case there were millions of Tories, and others, who thanked goodness that a politician had the courage to say what they were thinking.

What did Blair have to say on the issue? What does Blair have to say on the euro? What has he done with health or education? What has Labour to say about welfare, apart from blowing £5bn on the New Deal? Why do they deserve a second term, when they have wasted so much of the first?

The next election will be a contest between two assertions: that the Tories are "extreme" and uncaring and still hateful; and that Labour is high-taxing, meddlesome and PC, but otherwise basically vacuous. On the evidence of Thursday, the charge of vacuity is increasingly dangerous for Blair.

Boris Johnson is editor of the 'Spectator'.