Think Patriots v. Colts in the AFC championship last season. Everyone had said the British election would be tight and that no party would get a majority. As we know now, everyone was seriously wrong.

With the help of the Scottish Nationalist Party, the Conservative party flattened Labour. (The Conservatives are like the Republican party but less so. Labour is like the Democratic party but more so.) The polls had said the Tories would get from 270 to 290 seats of the 650 seats in Parliament and probably just edge Labour. They got 330, enough to govern without the help of any other party. Labour was expected to get from 260 to 280 seats. The party got 232. The SNP took 40 of its 41 seats in Scotland. To add insult to injury, the head of the Labour party in Scotland lost to a 20-year-old college student.

The Tories’ former coalition-mates, the Liberal Democrats — a kind of centrist party who on some issues are to the left of Labour, weirdly enough — pretty much disappeared. They began the day with 57 MPs (members of Parliament) and ended it with eight. The United Kingdom Independence Party, which wants to free the U.K. from the EU, got 13% of the vote but only one MP. Its leader, Nigel Farage, failed to win the seat he had run for. The Green Party got far fewer votes than UKIP but also won one seat.

This means that if the Tories remain united, they can do anything they want and the opposition can’t do anything to stop them, even if every single MP from every opposition party agreed. The leaders of Labour, the “Lib Dems” and UKIP all resigned today within an hour of each other.

Labour’s Laments

What lessons does the Tories’ victory have for American conservatives? I’m going to look at what some of Labour’s supporters are saying, since they have an insider’s view and the clarity that can come with defeat. I’m taking writers from The Guardian, England’s New York Times but more to the left, and The New Statesman, a weekly magazine often called Labour’s in-house journal.

These and other commentators recognized all the usual political factors for the result. People vote the way they do for all sorts of reasons. The Tories had several advantages and Labour several challenges. Nevertheless, the commentators focused on the personal and ideological as the deepest reason for their party’s disastrous collapse.

“Even its natural supporters no longer knew what Labour stood for. Random policies were thrown into the ether,” said Guardian columnist Owen Jones. Labour’s leader Ed Miliband didn’t connect with voters, but worse, “his failure to offer a message of hope that was inspiring, credible or coherent has doomed his party to a calamity at the polls.”

The lack of clarity resulted from the deep divisions in the party, argued Guardian columnist Rafael Behr. “The painful reality for the party is that its leader cobbled together an inchoate platform that masked fierce ideological differences in the ranks,” between the pro-market “New Labour” wing and the socialist wing. “From the outside it looked like a tactical fudge — splitting the difference between two drastically opposed directions. …. It was a subtle, sometimes abstract message, and Britain didn’t get it.”

Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff said of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, “Whatever she’s got, her rivals badly need some of it.” While the other parties “fought fearful, negative campaigns, she has connected with voters via an upbeat, hopeful message.” Sturgeon had an answer when asked “whether, by trouncing Scottish Labour, she has saddled her supporters with a Tory government they passionately didn’t want. It wasn’t her fault, she said tartly, that Labour hadn’t done well enough in England.”

Despite doing all sorts of unpopular things, writes Matthew d’Ancona, another Guardian columnist, the Conservatives worked hard to “identify a clear palette of issues and stick to it.” The Tory message stressed prime minister David Cameron’s “competence” against Miliband, who never managed to look particularly competent.

Writing in The New Statesman, the magazine’s political editor George Eaton mentioned the Tories’ tactics, especially their “scare campaign” linking Labour to the SNP and its plan to break up the United Kingdom, plus “the hostility of the press to Labour and the Conservatives’ funding advantage.” But the main reason is “the fundamentals” of politics. “For years, the Conservatives had enjoyed a commanding advantage on leadership and economic management” and Labour did nothing to change that.

In addition, Eaton argued, the party argued for a softer version of the Tories’ policies on economics. “In the absence of a clearer dividing line between the Tories and Labour, voters hungry for an alternative to the coalition were drawn to the SNP, Ukip and the Greens.”

Lessons From the Tory Victory

The Labour writers’ answers (and several others I read) suggest some lessons for American conservatism and the Republican Party. They’re not new, but they are lessons conservative politicians don’t always remember.

1) A party that wants to win needs to be true to its identity and that identity has to be clearly distinct from any other party’s. Voters don’t get out to vote for a party that’s only a softer version of the other party, when that other party’s in power and things are going all right (even if not great) for most people. They want to hear the party say, “We are this, not that.”

2) The party must agree on the basics. Trying to make up a general position to cover real differences will just make the party seem confused and probably untrustworthy. People will ask practical questions that will expose any attempts not to take a position on any basic matter. Voters want to hear, “We are all this.”

3) That party needs to be clear about what it wants to do. If the party’s not clear, a lot of voters will go with the incumbent party on the “better the devil you know” principle. It needs to draw clearly the connection of what it wants to do to its identity. Voters want to hear the party say, “We are this, therefore we do that.”

4) The party has to present voters with an ideal and a hope for a better future to which their policies will bring them. They can’t offer general promises of the sort any politician can make. The line from policies to ideals should be clear. Voters want to hear the party say, “We’re going to do this, therefore we’ll get there.”

5) Who’s in charge and incarnating your message makes a big difference, and the broad popular judgment may not be fair. Cameron came off as clear-thinking, in control, confident. Miliband didn’t. He doesn’t seem to have been as bad as the popular image, created in part by a hostile press, but he still didn’t look like the leader Cameron did. Cameron incarnated the Conservative message better than Miliband incarnated Labour’s.

The Final Lesson

In summary: Have a principled position that makes sense, keep only those people who really believe it, create policies that express those principles in public life, articulate it forcefully, and tell people where it will take them. And remember that, as St. Paul would have pointed out, leadership (or headship) matters a lot.

Political life pushes a party and its candidates away from this kind of clarity and integrity. There’s always something to be gained right away from blurring lines, hedging bets, hiding your real ideas and promising the moon. But it doesn’t work in the long run. In the long run, you find yourself 100 seats behind the other party, your party bitterly divided and facing long years helplessly watching the other party do what it wants.