Not that any of this could not have been predicted. It was, and by none other than Jim Flaherty, Mr. Eves's fellow cabinet minister and chief rival in last year's leadership campaign. The centrist, accommodating Mr. Eves, Mr. Flaherty warned, far from the safe political choice of his supporters' dreams, risked becoming the provincial version of Kim Campbell, the leader who turns a dynasty into dust.

He was not heeded, and in truth the election was lost even then.

For the party had long since lost its nerve. The say-anything Tories, the smooth-talking Bill Davis Tories, for whom policy was a dirty word and "conservative" a term of abuse, had come down from the hills where they had been hiding through the Mike Harris years. They found a party afraid of losing power but without the will to fight for it, and they persuaded them they did not have to: Ernie would save them. Mr. Eves is the kind of leader that parties in that condition elect.

There is an irony in this, which is that all Mike Harris ever wanted to do was to return the province to the Davis era, the time of his political coming of age. The Common Sense Revolution, for all its radicalism, would only have rolled back the increases in spending imposed by the Liberals and the NDP in the preceding "lost decade." In the end, he did not succeed even in that: Awash in revenues, despite (or because of) its tax cuts, the Harris government quickly lost all interest in fiscal discipline. By the time Mr. Harris left office, the Tories were spending as much, in real dollars per capita, as the Peterson Liberals at their peak.

The deterioration began almost from the moment the party was elected, the reformist zeal of the first year rapidly dissipating in the bloody conflict over municipal amalgamation (never part of the CSR) and the endless war of attrition with the teachers' unions. No major assets were privatized; no serious reform was made to the province's health and education systems, notwithstanding some minor improvements.

The two exceptions to this general trend were the reform of Ontario Hydro and, of course, tax cuts. While neither went as far as one might have liked -- the Tories succumbing on the one hand to the ambitions of Hydro managers, on the other to populist opposition to cutting taxes "for the rich" -- these were nevertheless the kinds of modest reforms one might expect a mainstream conservative party to effect.

But apparently even these were too much for the people around Mr. Eves. The former finance minister had campaigned for the leadership as a consolidator, a cautious, do-nothing premier who would give the province a respite from the raucousness of the Harris years. In fact, he proved something of a radical, reneging on promised tax cuts and reversing Hydro reforms already enacted.

For a time Mr. Eves basked in the approval of the Toronto Star editorial board. It did not last.

And the election came. You can trace the decline of the Tories in the names of their campaign manifestos: from the swashbuckling Common Sense Revolution in 1995 to the constrained Blueprint (a design for careful managers) in 1999 to the impossibly vague Road Ahead in 2003. What's on that road? Where does it lead? Who knows?

More to the point, who cares? It does not seem to have occurred to the Eves people, but having won the leadership by false pretenses, having torn up signed contracts, having violated the party's most sacred oaths -- the Harris government went so far as to pass a law vowing not to raise taxes without a referendum; the Eves government did just that -- there is little point in making campaign promises: Nobody believes them. The party can offer whatever sordid electoral bribes it likes (if Mr. Eves, instead of calling it mortgage interest deductibility, were to write a cheque for $500 to every house-owner in the province, it would amount to the same thing, without the pretense of some sort of foundation in policy) but these have no effect, even on their intended recipients.

Which is the party's problem more generally. If there were ever any prospect of Mr. Eves appealing to centrist voters, that is no longer the case: not with his recent, clumsy pitches to the right, and not with the cloddish reprise of those nasty "he's not up to the job" attack ads on Dalton McGuinty, the Liberal leader, that worked so well for the Tories in 1999. (Apparently, he's "still not up to the job." How inventive.) At the same time, Mr. Eves has so thoroughly alienated the Conservative base over the past 18 months of destruction that they are more than likely to sit this one out. Indeed, he should probably hope they do.

For more than a few Tories have come to the conclusion that it would be better on balance -- for the province, and for the party -- if they lost this election. True, the prospect of four years under Mr.

McGuinty's Liberals is a dismal one. But not half so dismal as that of returning Mr. Eves and his smug, disconnected team of advisers and hangers-on to power.

Ontario can endure a few years of misgovernment. What it cannot endure is to be bereft of leadership on either side of the aisle: a mushy, unprincipled government, egged on by a mushy, unprincipled opposition. If it takes a spell in opposition for the Tories to find their way again, so be it.