David Cameron may feel lucky after the Bradford West result, but the past 10 days have exposed his party as out of touch
Like Tony Blair or Barack Obama, David Cameron has that most precious of political commodities: luck. Just when he appeared to be staggering to the end of the fortnight from hell, along came George Galloway – neither riding a white horse, nor purring like a cat, but surfing what he called a "tidal wave" in Bradford West.
Galloway's victory broke all byelection records but it also broke the run of negative news about the Conservatives that had afflicted the party since last week's budget. By this morning, the Westminster interrogators were shining their inquisitor's lamp into the face not of the prime minister, but of Ed Miliband.
The Labour leader needed the questions this weekend to be all about Cameron and his hapless, rapidly retoxifying government. Instead, too many are about his party's failure to retain a seat that Labour won easily in 2010. Given all that has gone wrong for the Tories, how on earth could Labour lose?
The answer Miliband can legitimately offer is that Bradford West was a one-off result produced by a truly one-off politician. No one will conclude from Thursday's victory that Respect is set to win a 180-seat majority at the next general election. There are not many constituencies with comparable numbers of Muslim voters for whom Iraq and Afghanistan are still dominant issues and, as one senior Labour figure puts it, "There's only one Galloway". Even roving George, who has put his florid oratory at the service of constituents from Glasgow Hillhead to Bethnal Green and Bow, can only represent one seat at a time.
Despite those consolations, Bradford West leaves Labour with at least two awkward questions. The first is about organisation, the sine qua non of politics. Even if one accepts that Galloway's gigawatt charisma made him an irresistible force, why was Labour taken by surprise on Thursday night? How did its campaign co-ordinators not see what was coming? More troublingly, the MP John Mann, who canvassed in the seat, noted that Labour's team included "no Muslim doorknockers, no Urdu speaker, no hijab-wearing woman talking to Muslim women voters". Mann concludes: "We had no game plan. No strategy."
The second question is about Ed Miliband himself. True, few politicians could go head to head with Galloway and win. But it's troubling for Labour that there isn't more energy or excitement around its leader, even after 10 days in which the government has been on the ropes.
More of this punishment could be on the way too. Tory strategists look forward to 4 May, when they confidently project Labour will be reeling from defeats in London and in Glasgow council elections. They expect pressure on Miliband to intensify then, even though, in fairness, local factors will be at play in those places just as they were in Bradford. If the Tories are right, voters in both the capital and Scotland may well be delivering a verdict on Ken Livingstone or the SNP rather than Miliband, but that subtlety is likely to be lost in headlines that scream of serial defeat.
Hence the relief in Downing Street. One senior official admits that he and his colleagues were reduced to semi-hysterical laughter at one point during the real-life episode of The Thick of It in which they found themselves this week: "There were people going through the prime minister's diaries, trying to work out when he might have bought a pasty from a station, while others were debating the semantics of the words 'jerry can'. Meanwhile the chancellor was scurrying through a back entrance to avoid meeting the Sun journalist dressed as Marie Antoinette who wanted to hand him a cold pasty."
High comedy indeed, but none of it should obscure the serious dangers these last 10 days have exposed for the Conservatives. First, the government's reputation for competence has taken a dent. Witness Francis Maude's "don't panic" advice to motorists which prompted … a panic. The 40% burns suffered by a York woman who decanted petrol in her kitchen may or may not have been related to Maude's advice, but either way he and the government needlessly spooked the public about a shortage that did not exist.
Governments can't afford to mess with competence. Once they are seen as incapable of running the country, the game is up. The political argument stops being about direction of travel, and centres on whether the government can even start the engine. The current administration is not yet at that point, but they've had a glimpse of just how quickly such a turnaround can come.
The more immediate concern is the one that preoccupies the political heads in No 10 most: the fear that for all the modernisation efforts of the early Cameron period, the Tories are once again seen as the party of the rich, whose driving objective is to feather the nests of their wealthy pals.
The turning point here was the budget, trashed by Tory-friendly papers as well as hostile ones for slashing the 50p top rate even as it stung pensioners. At a stroke, the deficit-cutting, national unity message – we're all in this together – was fatally undermined. The weekend revelations that Tory fundraisers had been selling dinner with David and Sam for £250,000 a pop killed off the slogan for good. Ever since Cameron took over as party leader, Labour have struggled to know how to play the class card. Branding him a toff backfired badly at the Crewe and Nantwich byelection in 2008. After that, Labour steered well clear.
But now that problem has been solved, thanks to the Tories themselves. They have confirmed themselves as the party of the rich, who call dinner "supper", who don't eat pasties and tax the ordinary folk who do, who have houses with garages, who sell policymaking access to the very rich, whose taxes promptly get lowered. They are pampered, smooth-cheeked men, out of touch with the lives of those they govern.
That is the critique that has crystallised these last two weeks. Downing Street strategists accept this is something they cannot shift; that even their own supporters believe the Tories will always look after the well-off. The task now, they concede, is to insist that the party will also protect the interests of the hard-working "strivers". But even that smaller ambition is hard to achieve when Maude is talking about "kitchen suppers" and Osborne is cutting the taxes of the richest.
So this week has unsettled both parties, proving to both just how vulnerable they are. And yet the story that will surely decide their fate was the one that got least attention: the revised figures showing that the British economy shrunk by 0.3% in the last quarter of 2011. Not nearly as eye-catching as dinner with Cameron or victory for George, but in the end that might be the fact that determines the course of British politics.
Twitter: @j_ freedland