As of last Friday, the Tories had a lead of 2,5,9 or 13% depending on whether you back the predictive abilities of the Sun YouGov poll at one end, or Angus Reid at the other. My own view remains that Reid’s propeller-heads are nearer the mark, and that abstentions will sink Labour. But as time goes on, I have two nagging doubts about the opinion. One concerns (obviously) the alleged collapse in the Tory marginals lead; the other involves the unusually large number of vote-switchers this time around.

Harris Poll reckons that New Labour has lost a third of its voters to other Parties since 2005. That’s a staggering number, and something of a measure of just what degree of electoral anti-matter Gordon Brown represents. While 14% of Tories have also switched riders, twice as many new recruits came in.

There are clues here and there that some of the Tory deserters have moved Right with the arrival of Cameron. This would make sense – and fits very well with some of the feedback I’ve been getting (from various canvassing sources) about high UKIP support in some English seats. But quite a few of the 14% won’t vote either; and when even Tories won’t vote at all, you really know something is very wrong with politics – which, of course, it is. Otherwise, if I’m being honest, numpties like Nigel Farage wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Using this and other polls as a guideline, The Slogger calculates that the total ‘loss’ from all the traffic volumes moving around is about 6%. These haven’t gone to the Liberal Democrats: they look more and more like abstainers to me…suggesting a national turnout of around 53% nationally. And whatever one thinks of our silly electoral system, low turnouts under that system favour the Conservatives.

Norwich North is the object lesson, and probably a crystal ball, when it comes to looking at the likely beneficiaries – the Conservatives. In the Norwich by-election last year, the Party’s young female candidate won the seat with less than 20% of the vote. Take any seat where the Tories have a reasonable chance, Labour voters are disillusioned with empty spin, and the Libdems are nowhere – and you have a pretty easy gain for the Opposition.

I’m often asked why the Tory vote holds up better than its Conservative equivalent. It wasn’t always so: in 1945, a lot of Churchill fans saw the result as a foregone conclusion – but the blokes who’d been shot at for four years or more were firm that they were not under any circumstances going back to the 1930s and ‘the bosses’ in charge.

At some point in the late 1950s – when people had Never Had It So Good – the average Labour voter became altogether less political. The Welfare State offered virtually universal safety from starvation, and Macmillan’s One Nation Toryism seemed hardly worth opposing. After this, I think, apart from the Trade Union activists parodied so hilariously by Peter Sellers in I’m Alright Jack, the class-conscious working man became a thing of the past. Revitalised briefly by the confrontationalism of the 1970s, he has since died out along with our old industrial base.

Labour voting at the core these days is a matter of family tradition and thoughtless habit. Tory voting, by contrast, is more often a melange of fear, duty and addiction. This is Labour’s core problem: the Party got round it in 1997 by pretending to be something else, and thus attracting the bored lower middle classes. But that trick will never be possible again.

Three weeks ago, The Sunday Times ran with a curious front-page lead headlined ‘LABOUR ON COURSE TO BE BIGGEST PARTY’. The piece was unsubstantiated bollocks from beginning to end, and probably represented Digger reverse-psychology at its lowest brow: ‘let’s tell that f**kin’ Dingo Toff Cameron this isn’t a bloody shoe-in’. Wobbles or not – and I am dismayed by the squabbles at the top of the Tory Party – short of the Opposition Leader going catatonic during the next two months, there is no way New Labour will get a majority or anything near it. The best thing they can hope for is to be the biggest Party in a hung Parliament; and I can’t see Clegg tolerating a Brown-led Government.

At the risk of repeating myself even more than usual, this remains Cameron’s election to lose. The last few days have seen Osborne and Clarke breaking out from the bizarre politeness of recent weeks. Squeezing out the last few drops of Tory vote and the odd guilty abstainer isn’t a bad idea. Above all, given the empirical reality of our fiscal mess, their appeal is the most moral one on offer.