I awoke this morning and thought that some malevolent passing time traveller had picked me up and as part of a disturbing Time Lord joke, dumped me in February 1974. The impression was very vivid. Through my sleep encrusted eyes, I could have sworn that I saw the shade of Barbara Castle floating through my bedroom repeatedly saying, ‘in place of strife, in place of strife’ along with hearing Ted Heath’s ebullient laugh and smelling Harold Wilson’s pipe smoke.

The result of the 2017 General Election, an election that the Prime Minister Theresa May did not have to call, reminds me ominously of the February 1974 General Election. In the case of 1974, ‘the year of two elections’, Edward Heath’s Tories were in long term dispute with the Trade Unions, as the unions were hampering the business of government with wildcat strikes and widespread industrial disruption. An exasperated and some say petulant Heath called an election with the Conservatives asking the people ‘who governs Britain’, the elected government or the Trade Unions? The voters spoke and said not you Mr Heath.

After negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberals (forerunners of today’s Lib Dems) failed, Her Majesty the Queen asked Wilson to lead a minority government. This government staggered on until a second election in October when Wilson won a more comfortable majority. There then followed five years of a Labour government mired in economic problems and beset by industrial unrest. Newspaper and television pictures of piles of rotting rubbish heaping up in Leicester Square amongst other places because of yet more strikes, finally convinced voters in the 1979 election that radical change in the form of Margaret Thatcher was required.

Like Heath in 1974, this election for Theresa May was hers to lose and lose it she did. As is so often the case oppositions don’t win elections, governing parties lose them. Ms May carried out a lacklustre campaign to flog an off-putting Conservative manifesto where both campaign and manifesto seems to have been put together by small teams remote from the political coalface. There are a number of people in Tory central office who should be given their P45’s over this disaster not just for the Tory party but possibly for the nation.

Jeremy Corbyn should have been an easy target to beat, after all he’s often condemned himself and shown himself to be happy to be friends with the worst sort of Irish or Islamic terrorist, by his own words and actions. Theresa May couldn’t even hit this very easy target and it is entirely her own fault that this has happened. Firstly there was the remote and cold way that she campaigned. She was plainly uncomfortable with the sort of glad-handing and getting her face out there in front of the public which is vital to get support from voters. Then there was the debacle of the Conservative manifesto which threatened to attack the well-being of the sort of hard working and striving taxpayers that the party depends on for core support. The way Ms May handled the Islamic terror attacks could have been better, a lot better. Very few people who knew of her piss poor record at the Home Office, when it comes to dealing with Islamic problems, trusted her to deal effectively with this issue and didn’t treat her statement that ‘enough is enough’ with any degree of seriousness.

She made major mistakes by trying to blame free speech on the internet for the Islamic terror problems Britain is suffering from, when it’s quite obvious that the sources of radicalisation are the mosques and madrassas that promote extremism. This pissed off a lot of counter jihad people and those concerned with preserving our rights to speak critically of everything, including Islam.

On the subject of Brexit, Ms May also didn’t have the trust of many Leave voters, including myself. Her pre-Referendum position as a Remainer, left her tainted and distrusted and if the Tories had chosen a Brexiteer when Cameron resigned, this complete abortion of an election would never have occurred. The failure of Mrs May to thoroughly embrace the entirety of what we voted for last June, which was complete exit from the EU, also contributed to the distrust that she has been held in by voters.

If Ms May had not called this unnecessary vanity election in the first place, or if she had not run a campaign dominated by hubris, remoteness and incompetence, then we would not be seeing the result we are today. An opponent such as Corbyn, with his awful background and his empty promises of ‘free stuff’ to people who have mostly never had to pay the tax the funds this ‘free stuff’, should have been as easy to beat as Michael Foot was beaten by Margaret Thatcher in 1983.

Unfortunately Theresa May is no Margaret Thatcher far from it and she’s shown that, not just this morning, but throughout the whole election campaign. Margaret Thatcher, for all her faults and despite her sometimes undeserved reputation as an destroyer, did have a feel for the attitudes of the nation. Theresa May doesn’t have this feel and couldn’t put herself in the shoes of the average voter, something that Thatcher was supremely able to do in her early days.

Theresa May’s foolish and arrogant gamble on an election has not only blown up in all our faces but her campaign was so bad that it made an Islamophiliac friend of terrorists like Corbyn look good.

There was loads that Theresa May could have done to avoid this debacle. She could have not called this election in the first place but having done so she should have had some feel for what may be popular with the voters. Penalising the hard working and hard saving people with the extremely anti-conservative social care policy that would have stopped people, people who’ve most often been taxpayers, working hard in order to pass on wealth to their children, was a major vote loser in my opinion. Mrs May and her advisers should have headed off Corbyn’s promise of ‘free stuff’ for students by reinstating the old grant system, but limiting this right to the top 10% to 20% of A level students, or for those embarking on degree subjects that are useful for the economy and the nation. This sort of policy would have both been popular with younger voters and their parents and would have appeared to the wider community as a fair reward for hard working A level students who have done exceptionally well.

The Tories also failed to properly inform young voters of the dangers that they face both economically and socially, from the current inappropriate levels and types of migration. If the Tories had emphasised the fact that this type and levels of migration means less jobs, housing and access to services for our young people then that may have garnered more votes from that demographic. As Paul Joseph Watson declares, ‘Conservatism is the New Counterculture’ but Theresa May didn’t put a proper ‘countercultural’, pro-British conservative manifesto before Britain’s young people as an option to choose to support. This is especially the case for those from working class communities who have suffered from the economic impact of excessive migration and whose towns and cities are being adversely affected by Islamisation.

Young people in these communities, who’ve been abandoned by the political classes, were not, as maybe they should have been, offered a robust, patriotic, economically sound, pro British and honest about Islam option that they should have been offered. The Tories have this morning suffered the consequences of that mistake. Tory party managers must have been aware of the large amount of leftist guff that our young people are fed in schools and colleges and should have laid hard facts about migration and terror down on the table in order to counteract that brainwashing. It was only arrogance by these party managers both in assuming UKIP voters would vote Tory and that young people would not follow Corbyn the socialist snake oil salesman, that stopped them from doing so.

The ‘Party of Brussels’ aka the Janus faced Lib Dems, did much better than expected and it’s likely that these new MP’s will cause problems for Theresa May’s government, if she continues in her post, and they will try to scupper Brexit. Like Corbyn’s Labour, they should not have done as well as they could and it seems that they’ve picked up votes from those who could not stomach either voting for Corbyn or May.

As for UKIP, well they are dead. Former UKIP voters didn’t quite hold their nose and vote Tory as May’s election planners arrogantly thought they would. Those voters who had temporarily loaned their normal Labour or Tory votes to UKIP, to a large extent went back to their original homes. Maybe if UKIP had taken more robust positions regarding migration and especially about the dangers of Islam and Shariah Law, as is the view of former UKIP candidates such as Anne Marie Waters, then they may have done better.

The only bright spots in the whole unnecessary process was the rebirth of the Tories in Scotland, which may be a sign that the Scots are getting tired of the socialist policies of the Scottish National Party and the defeat of the appalling and incompetent Lib Dem Sarah Olney in Richmond upon Thames.

As regards the medium term I believe that there is a gap in the market for an unashamedly patriotic party that stands up for British people and British values and which is unapologetically opposed to ideologies such as Islam, that want us dead. However, I don’t think UKIP as being capable of being that party any more. In the short term, and looking forward to a possible second election in either November 2017 or February 2018, then the focus must be on protecting Brexit and keeping Corbyn out of Number Ten. But for that to happen, the Conservatives may, depending on how close the new election is, needs to go into the next election with a much better leader than Theresa May. The party may need to go to the polls with a leader who is known to be favourable to Brexit and who recognises that the EU is in deep financial and political trouble, trouble that we need to be somewhat divorced from when the brown stuff hits the fan.

A decent patriotic Tory leader may win back those who either voted Labour out of disgust at Theresa May or who stayed at home. I would certainly vote for a Tory manifesto that prioritised leaving the dangerously authoritarian EU and which was more honest about the Islam and Islamism challenges that the country faces and which promised a robust response to these challenges. Although I can see the attraction for the Tories of a new leader, practically, in the short term, with no appetite for another internal party coronation, of the sort that brought Theresa May to Number Ten, May might be the least worst option in the eye of party managers, especially with Brexit negotiations rapidly approaching.

There are a number of similarities between June 2017 and February 1974, but there are also many differences. Back then, the major threats and the major issues were economic competence, industrial strife and inflation but today the problems are much greater. Today we face a lethal Islamic insurgency carried out by an Islamic fifth column which have not been effectively tackled by either Labour or Tory governments. In the case of Labour between 1997 and 2010 they actively made the problem much worse. A weak Tory government, or worse still an actively Islamopandering Labour government, would be rather too vulnerable to adverse influence by Islamic activists, none of whom have our best interests at heart. This result I’m afraid, makes civil and political conflict between Muslims voting, sometimes fraudulently, purely for Islamic interests, their Leftist allies and the rest of us, much more likely.

On the subject of Islamic voter fraud there were some seats, Battersea and Bethnal Green in London or Batley and Spen for example where the swing to Labour or away from the Tories, looked to me a bit greater than one would expect merely from students and the benefit classes voting for ‘free stuff’ or people returning their vote to Labour after being loaned to UKIP. They raise for me suspicions of malpractice. I’d be interested to see the postal vote figures later for these and other constituencies with similar demographics, especially as I suspect that a number of the postal votes in these areas may be fraudulently signed ‘Mohammed’.

The gamble that Theresa May took has not paid off and the blame for that lies fairly and squarely on her shoulders and hers alone. A lacklustre campaign, a piss-poor manifesto, a refusal to engage properly with voters or to take part in the right number or type of televised debates fatally wounded the Conservatives. We may well, hopefully, have dodged a bullet in the form of Corbyn and his wreckers, but things are not clear cut at the moment and this complete mess of a result is the fault of Theresa May’s decisions and conduct. If, after negotiations for a supply and support agreement, with minor parties such as the Democratic Unionist Party, we get a relatively stable government then it will be no thanks to Theresa May or her arrogance and hubris.