IT WAS the longest election campaign in living memory, but it will surely live longer in the annals of British political history as one of the greatest electoral triumphs that anyone can remember.

For this was not just a spectacular victory for Labour, it was an earthquake that went off the Richter scale.

Yet, as those shock waves continue to numb the battered Tories after a nightmare night in which seat after seat was engulfed by Tony Blair's tidal wave, such an awesome outcome proves that the dam had long been been ready to burst.

For, surely, the torrent of votes was against the Tories.

Britain might be booming, but people were out to punish the Conservatives for all that had gone before.

Here was the payback for the recession, the tax lies and the sleaze.

The fact that the Liberal Democrats, too, had their most successful night in living memory proves the point.

The voters wanted to fling out the Tories wherever they could.

And see the voters' scorn - focused so spectacularly at Tatton where former minister Neil Hamilton was executed by anti-corruption candidate Martin Bell.

None of this diminishes the victory engineered by New Labour.

But the fact is that, in ditching much of its Left-wing ideology and embracing many of the Tory reforms of the 1980s, Tony Blair's party had become a Conservative look-alike - but one without the millstones around its neck that John Major's party had.

That was the difference which gave Labour the people's trust - and so spectacularly.

And, above all, it was done on the centre ground vacated by the Tories' rightward lurch as John Major vainly tried to prevent it.

There will be a bitter hunt now in the Tory Party for the men to blame. John Major may be made the scapegoat and, after such a slaughter, he could hardly stay in any case.

But the fault, surely, lies with the "bastards" who, over Europe and the single currency, ripped the Tory Party apart into such naked disunity.

They made a huge electoral mistake in believing that the electorate was packed with Little Englanders. It wasn't.

For, as proved by the rout of the Referendum Party - epitomised by its leader Sir James Goldsmith suffering the ignominy of a lost deposit at Putney - the voters do not want extremes, on Europe or anything else, but moderation.

And how cleverly New Labour's cautious moderation and centrism appealed to that outlook and won the voters' trust.

But what now?

For the Tories, there must be a wake of in-fighting that determines where the party goes - still to the right, or back to the centre. Who knows.

But Britain has a new government. It is new, inexperienced and in many ways vague, but with a huge mandate that will give it the mastery to be as radical as it likes.

Yet if caution and conservatism won it for Tony Blair, he will be wise at the outset to realise how departure from the centre ground can be so costly - as the whipped Tories know this historic day.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.