It certainly helped to reinforce William Hague's leadership, anyway. After coming under heavy fire from both inside and outside of the Conservative party, the results served notice that at last the Tories might be staging some sort of a comeback.

However, the context must be looked at carefully.

• Firstly, the turnout was very low. This will have helped Tory chances, because all the Tory voters, wanting to help the party escape its past nightmares, voted, but all the Labour voters stayed in, confident that they would win anyway.
• Labour still emerged with the most votes in the country, unprecedented at this stage of a government. Added to this the still-woeful showing the polls, and the Tories still have a long way to come.

In short? It's a start, but there's still an awful lot of work to be done before the Tories can say they've fully recovered from the worst parts of the end of the previous administration.

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