Charles Moore: The victorious Prime Minister could, if he chose, turn the Conservatives into English nationalists

The sharpest, most testing and penetrating piece on the Conservatives winning a majority comes from Charles Moore. 

It'll make soul-searching reading for some SNP supporters who may need to reply as to whether or not Nicola Sturgeon's made a 'serious mistake'....

"I hope David Cameron, in his hour of triumph, can find time to write a thank-you letter to Nicola Sturgeon. She won him this election. For all her party’s brilliance in capturing Scotland, she made a serious mistake in her UK campaign.

By boasting that she would forge an alliance for “progressive change” with Labour across the United Kingdom, she at last woke the English people from our slumber. Many of us don’t like “progressive change” at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. The idea that Ms Sturgeon’s party should help impose it – and we should pay for it – was just too much."

Presciently, Moore sees a tight as a strait-jacket quandary for unionists who are Eurosceptic and hoping to vote in the 2017 referendum that England leave the EU. In voting that England leave the EU, do they risk tearing the Union apart?  

"Anyone who votes, in 2017, to get out of the EU now risks breaking up the United Kingdom, with Scotland heading for the Continent and England for the open sea. Mr Cameron is well placed to argue that our Union is best guaranteed within a bigger one, so long as the EU agrees to be loose-fitting. More and more, for those who want to break absolutely with Europe, the referendum is looking like a trap."