How the Tory election machine fell apart

The conventional wisdom is that the Conservatives are good at elections. Last month they failed spectacularly. But do recriminations about negative tactics mask deeper problems for a party that hasn’t won convincingly since the Thatcher era?In September 2015, a few months after the Conservatives had won that year’s general election, more comfortably than even their most optimistic supporters had hoped, a veteran Tory politician and journalist was waiting to appear on a BBC radio show