Five more years. And "more of the same"? Or will it be that, unconstrained by a LibDem coalition ally, that David Cameron and the Tories are at last free to be themselves? Columnist Matthew D'Ancona recalls 1992 when "not long after the Tories' [John Major's] unexpected election victory, a freshly promoted cabinet minister told me: 'We can do what we want now.' "? But as D'Ancona points out it was not to be then, any more than it will be so now. "Five years later, the Conservative palace lay in ruins, swept away by Hurricane Tony [Blair]."
There is no question of Cameron simply turning a new page. This Rubicon election – no matter how dull and uninspiring the campaign was – has itself made flesh new dynamics in British politics, dynamics over which even this majority government has precious little control, runaway trains leading potentially to British disengagement from the EU, and even towards the disintegration – or at least the reformulation – of the United Kingdom. The UK, as some commentators have it, is "self-federalising".
Yesterday Mr Cameron lost no time to acknowledge these challenges as critical, reassuring his backbenchers that "we will deliver that in-out referendum on our future in Europe". And in a tacit acceptance that the bête noir of his election, the SNP, has won a famous victory, a promise that "In Scotland, our plans are to create the strongest devolved Government anywhere in the world with important powers over taxation." This from the man who only days ago was most effectively castigating Labour for being about to sell its soul to the dreaded separatists.
Mr Cameron's desperate-sounding promise to "bring together the different nations of our united kingdom," is an admission the English and Scottish nationalist cats are already out of the bag and will not comfortably be confined again. Where Northern Ireland will fit in this reordering of the union is also not clear, although Mr Cameron may yet need the few DUP votes.
In confronting these challenges, no less than that of restoring the health of the UK economy, Mr Cameron has cast himself as a “one nation” Tory, speaking of the need to unite rather than divide. But it is a role that jars with his unruly rightwing, Eurosceptical backbenchers who will revel in the new fixed-term parliament rules, a freedom to break ranks with their party without jeopardising the government itself. Which will all make governing hugely problematic.
Mr Cameron can take some comfort, however, from the reality that the internal disarray into which trounced Labour, LibDems and Ukip have all fallen, with the resignations of all their leaders (although we're not sure if Nigel Farage is actually going), will give him a breathing space in which to reshape his government and message. And more of the same will simply not cut it.