This extraordinary general election has resulted in the extraordinary self-cancelling outcome of not one lame duck leader but two.

The Prime Ministerial victor is mortally damaged by the personal vote of no confidence expressed by the savage reduction in his majority. He is now in hock to both his head-banging left who will prevent him from getting his pet projects through Parliament, and to Gordon Brown, to whom he will almost certainly yield the premiership much sooner than 'at the end of a full term', whatever that ever meant, and you may rest assured that he will be mercilessly harried by the media every day until he does.

Michael Howard, meanwhile, has defied entreaties and advice to stay on as party leader in order to avoid precisely what will almost certainly now happen as a result of his decision to quit: a return of the fratricidal -- and possibly this time, terminal -- strife between the fatuously drawn opposing camps of 'traditionalists'and 'modernisers', aka tax-cutters v big spenders, or 'phobes' v fantasists.

Reality check: the only reason Howard was elected leader in the first place was because there was absolutely no-one else who was remotely competent to take on the poisoned chalice, a fact which is no less true today even if the chalice is thought to be finally being detoxified (second big mistake -- it's not. The Tories' strong showing was caused in large measure by negative voting against Blair, not support for their, ahem, 'vision' of the future of Britain, for which we are all still eagerly awaiting the first sighting). The new young bloods are just that, brand new and so wet behind the ears that the electorate they are now to be expected to form in order to produce yet another party leader will resemble nothing so much as a school assembly, of which the much-touted older young bloods of David Cameron and George Osborne are merely head prefects.

The Tories' problem could not be more fundamental. It is not that they have the wrong leader. It is that they do not know any longer what conservatism is or what their party is for, except gaining power. That is because they have conspicuously failed to understand what has happened to Britain and the west since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have not grasped that this is a culture hell-bent on committing social suicide and that it is their historic mission to defend and save it by articulating what it should look like instead. Instead, some of them are queueng up to help shove it off the edge of the cliff themselves.

Mr Blair -- poor Mr Blair -- thinks he knows what he wants power for, but in the end all it boils down to is to transform society and create utopia on earth simply by being Not The Evil Conservatve Party and therefore the Moral High Ground Which Spreads Harmony Where There Was Dissent Which Will No Longer Be Brooked; and try as he may to seize every available lever of power himself and create more and more enforcers to bypass the Whitehall machine and enforcers to whip the enforcers into line (hello Mr Blunkett), he finds to his utter bewilderment and dismay that everything still goes pear-shaped and people hate him more than ever.

As for the LibDems, what can one say except that they and Brian Sedgemore deserve each other, and the fact that people voted for them in such great numbers merely demonstrates the extent to which this country may already have reached the point of no return in the infantilism stakes.

I'm afraid there's a long way down still to go before this society starts to go up again; and maybe we never will.