ONE characteristic of those wholeheartedly committed to the programme of a particular party is that they are not usually good at self-reflection when it is firmly rejected. It took Labour a very long time to recover from Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979, and the Tories a similar period to change after Tony Blair’s victory in 1997.

Some delusions – that Jeremy Corbyn was ever electable – have to be cast aside, though if Labour picks its next leader from the Left, as it may well do, they ought to get ready for at least a decade out of office. Similarly, the notion of a Remain majority across the UK (even if there were ever a period that was true) is destroyed.

You can’t react to a majority on the scale achieved by Boris Johnson without acknowledging it as a mandate, or a wipeout like Labour’s (or the LibDems’) without seeing it as a rejection.

And while the SNP vote was clearly a Scottish rejection of Brexit, and arguably an endorsement of a second independence referendum – though that will not be certain until the Holyrood elections in 2021 – it doesn’t demonstrate a majority for independence. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.

There’s plenty of opposition to the Tories, even with their thumping, clear-cut win. But one delusion almost uniformly advanced by their political rivals is actually likely to impede the ability to challenge them effectively. It is this: that the Conservative Party under Mr Johnson’s leadership has moved to the Right, let alone that it is “the most far Right ever”, “authoritarian”, “ultra-nationalist” or any of the other labels blithely attached by opponents.

Any honest analysis makes it obvious that this claim is not true in any sense. The UK’s tax burden is at a 50-year high, the deficit is still over £40 billion, and national debt is about 86 per cent, almost twice Germany’s. Yet the Tory manifesto promises the biggest increase in the size of the state since Harold Macmillan’s government, minimum wage increases, and capital spending pledges 15 per cent above the last Budget at a higher level than any sustained in the last 40 years. That is not extreme fiscal conservatism by any measure.

The benchmark is not Labour’s “not credible” (the Institute of Fiscal Studies) plan to spend hundreds of billions, nationalise everything, give everyone free broadband and an owl, and turn rivers into lemonade, as the Orinoco in Venezuela did under Hugo Chávez. It is previous governments and economic reality: by those standards this is much higher spending.

Nor has there so far been any sign of social conservatism; indeed, Mr Johnson’s record as Mayor of London (a more reliable guide than trawling his newspaper columns from 25 years ago, looking for hyperbolic phrases to quote out of context and pretend to be outraged by) suggests the opposite.

The government’s policies are liberal on most social issues. Even on immigration, where the rhetoric remains strict (for electoral advantage), all mention of targets has been dropped from the draft proposals, in favour of noises about a “points-based” system – something we have already for non-EU migration, and exactly what was proposed by the SNP in 2014, in a way no one described as “practically fascist”.

The cavalier attitude towards pushing through Brexit before the election was a result of Parliament blocking a manifesto programme, but denying an election for any alternative mandate. Court judgments against the government were generally regarded as a surprise, remember, and then in any case complied with. Such procedural short cuts, even if ruled unacceptable, were hardly evidence of some Kristallnacht-style coup; while the election result ensures no likely repetition of such dodges.

So far, there’s no move Rightwards from the governments of David Cameron or Theresa May (or possibly even Tony Blair), and quite a lot in the other direction. Nor is there any evidence to suggest such a move in future, and in terms of their agenda and pledges so far, plenty to suggest that there won’t be one.

There will, and should, be significant movement in Tory policy. But it will be towards voters they managed to win round for the first time, largely from the previously Labour heartlands of the North of England – and not to the Right.

In one sense, the phenomenon is not entirely new, just new in this area. Working-class voters were attracted in their droves, and their support often retained, by Mrs Thatcher – but only really in the south of England. The new division is not between north and south. Nor between a working-class drawn from heavy industry and owned by Labour, and reactionary middle-class professionals and small business owners.

Instead there are on one side working people of all classes whose priority is a government that responds, not just by implementing popular votes, rather than blocking or rerunning them; but by tackling potholes, policing, health, education, transport and other basic issues.

And on the other side, those who favour identity politics, abstract and ideological agendas, overarching state, or superstate, powers, and misrepresent and demonise their opponents as racist, thick or extreme. Only one of those sides looks delusional.