So the results are now in: Tories up, Labour down, Lib Dems very slightly better off.

In the run-up to the election, the Tories were widely criticized (and not just on the Left) for having put immigration and asylum at the center of their campaign. As I wrote at VDare last week, however, the Tories' restrictionist platform was based on a perfectly straight-forward political calculation. With immigration and asylum the sole policy area in which the Tories consistently out-perform Labour in opinion polls, the rest was obvious.

Or at least it was obvious to me. MSM coverage of the Howard campaign has been more than usually incompetent, with many pundits blaming Howard for the next "Labour landslide" days and sometimes weeks before the election. Invariably, immigration headlined their list of grievances. Thus the execrable Anatole Kaletsky -- no friend of immigration reform, he -- writing for the Times one week ago:

By the end of next week, if the polls are to be believed, nobody will be interested in reading about the Tories and Michael Howard.

As the Libertarian wing of the party distanced itself from Howard, the Guardian became increasingly hysterical in its opposition to Howard's popular stance on immigration. As the paper's endorsement issue put it:

The Conservative party is the worst answer to what is wrong with Britain. Immediately this is because of the damaging and divisive campaign on immigration that Michael Howard has run this time. For this reason alone, it is vital to stop the Conservatives.

With the election now over, perhaps we can begin hoping for something like accurate coverage. Open Border ideologues of the Anatole Kaletsky variety will no doubt continue spinning against immigration reform, especially following news that Howard is to resign as party leader. Yet it will now be much more difficult to deny what should have been obvious all along: that the British public is fed up with out-of-control immigration, and that any party willing to take up the issue is a party that's moving up.

The Conservative Party's choice of a new leader in the days and weeks to come will determine whether Howard's popular stance on immigration and asylum will be maintained. I suggest they look closely at the polls. Immigration has been the only issue on which the Tories have enjoyed a real advantage over Labour and almost certainly explains the defection of working class whites to the Party in London and elsewhere. That said, May 5th can only be seen as an extraordinary victory.

After years in the political wilderness, Tory prospects are finally looking up. Let's hope they don't forget how they got that way.