A party in agony over a misunderstood election Conservative party staff dawdling in front of their computers are admonished by a screensaver that counts down the minutes until the general election in 2015. Soaring above these grunts, the Chequers group of senior Tories regularly convene to hone their political strategy. For an election that is still two years away, the forethought on the Conservative side is attaining a martial intensity. And yet the election that should detain David Cameron is the last one. The prime minister's estrangement from his party has many causes - the inexhaustibly vexed question of Europe, the same-sex marriage bill he takes to Parliament this week - but the rancour really set in with his failure to win in 2010. This original sin led to coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a political miscegenation that turns Tory stomachs, and broke the unspoken covenant that allows a leader to be as autocratic as he likes as long he delivers. Last week, a prime ministerial ally was reported to have disparaged the party's grassroots as "swivel-eyed loons." "Arrogant losers" tends to be the rejoinder. Mr Cameron has never openly addressed the question of why he fell short in 2010. Yet the battle to interpret that result is shaping his present and will influence the party's choice of an eventual successor. For Tories, it is a reference-point election in the way 1992 was for the Labour party. Through abstention by Mr Cameron and other modernisers, this battle is being won by his tormentors on the right. The abridged version of the right's account blames 2010 on a shoddy campaign that ignored conservative issues such as tax cuts and especially immigration in favour of esoteric waffle about the "Big Society." This was compounded by his foolish participation in televised debates that he flunked. The best that can be said about this analysis is that lots of people have bought it. The Tory campaign was indeed a shapeless farce that included, among other mortifying vignettes, a manifesto that many senior figures had not seen until the eve of publication. It is also true that Mr Cameron, who was sincerely likened to Tony Blair by his giddier aides, was exposed by those debates as a more workmanlike politician. But the importance of these failures is overblown. By the time the formal election campaign began in April of that year, hopes of an overall parliamentary majority were already fading. The Tories" poll lead had been dwindling since the previous autumn, which was when the party began to elucidate its plan to cut the fiscal deficit more aggressively than Labour would. This candour was admirable and far-sighted - the present austerity would be politically unbearable had voters not been warned it was coming - but even at the time the Tories feared it would cost them votes. The party's strategic core (Mr Cameron and George Osborne, then shadow chancellor, plus the now departed advisers Steve Hilton and Andy Coulson) were having crisis meetings as early as January, long before the debates and the manifesto. As for the campaign proper, the Big Society took up a single day in the Tory "grid." And the idea that Mr Cameron erred by not touting the issue of immigration has been sent on its way by the forensic Lord Ashcroft, a Tory campaign veteran who does not let his own conservatism cloud his psephological insight. The party had a 39-point lead over Labour on immigration but was only narrowly favoured on the economy and trailed on the National Health Service. It takes a special kind of person to look at these numbers and conclude that Mr Cameron's underachievement had anything to do with immigration, but the Tory party has lots of them. For all the campaign's haplessness, the Tories ended it with roughly the same poll lead over Labour as they began it. Mr Cameron was still preferred by voters to his party. The campaign was a non-event, as they usually are. The real reason for the Tories" failure had more to do with the economic insecurity that nagged at voters when shown blueprints for austerity by a party they already mistrusted. That the economy was slithering out of recession at the same time hardened their risk aversion. Fiscal clarity made for bad short-term politics, and yet the blame has somehow gone to other, softer aspects of the Tory offering. The Conservatives did not fail because they were seen as high-minded metropolitans, but because they were too redolent of the same old Tories. They had changed too little, not too much. The people who should have been vindicated by 2010 were the modernisers. But their chronic passivity, their lordly distaste for a fight, has allowed a misremembered version of that election to become the definitive history. This is undermining Mr Cameron and shaping a future in which only the ideologically orthodox can lead the Tories. The modernisers have never understood that the truth only gets you so far. The wrong people can still win if their arguments go unanswered. Politicians are meant to look forward but it matters if they lose the war for the past. In the Tory party, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. It is suffering as a result.