Shane Greer: Cameron botched the campaign, but now he must battle to save his party

But then, the true nature of this most memorable of election nights was brought into sharp relief. Sunderland Central, the most winnable of this North Eastern trinity for the Conservatives, declared only a 4.8 per cent swing in their favour. The geographic proximity of these seats alone would have suggested some uniformity in result, but not so.

At this moment it became clear – the uniform national swing, which has dominated so many preceding elections, was dead. In its place we were left with 649 individual elections, whose results would be varied and completely unpredictable.

The end result, as we now know, was a hung Parliament. Despite the cards being stacked in their favour, the Conservatives had resolutely failed to seal the deal with the electorate.

So, what went wrong as Gordon Brown upped the stakes last night and resigned to open the door to Labour forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats that would have the potential of denying the Tories the victory that they thought they had secured?

Three principal problems stand above all others: a lack of clear leadership in the campaign, an obsession with scoring short-term victories and a failure to communicate the right messages. Large campaigns require a strong full-time campaign manager.

For Barack Obama, that person was David Plouffe, for Boris Johnson in his 2008 London mayoral bid it was Lynton Crosby. Incredibly though, despite the stakes, the Tories opted to install their Shadow Chancellor as a part-time manager. And with his attention divided, the result was predictable, a campaign run by committee which was characterised more by its internal disagreements than by its discipline. Compounding this crisis of leadership was the campaign's addiction to scoring quick hits in the media. The best example of this relates to the debates. Steve Hilton, the Conservative's director of strategy, took the view that the party could secure a quick win in the media by challenging Gordon Brown to a debate they knew he wouldn't agree to.

What they didn't expect, primarily because they couldn't think ahead of the next day's headline, was the possibility that their challenge could set in motion a chain of events which would culminate in live televised debates taking place. The Conservatives never wanted the debates, but thanks to their short-termism, they got them. And then there's the "Big Society". Without conducting any research into whether this new term was something which resonated with voters, Steve Hilton and Co decided to unleash it onto the world and literally hope for the best. Only when a US consultant brought in to help the campaign, Bill Knapp, challenged Hilton about research did they finally conduct some focus groups. The result? The public didn't like it. And why would they? It's hardly a concept that puts fire in your belly.

With another General Election likely to take place in the next 12 months, it's critical that the party get to grips with these and the many other factors which fatally undermined their efforts leading up to last Thursday. But there's an even more pressing reason to address the failures of the campaign, sooner rather than later; the threat of PR.

Thanks to the Conservatives' badly run campaign, we now have a hung Parliament. And thanks to the hung Parliament, the Lib Dems have been gifted the opportunity of a lifetime to see proportional representation installed in the United Kingdom. But such a result would be disastrous for the country.

Consider for a moment the following: over the last 50 years in the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, there have been 103 elections. And how many times has there been a change in government? Six. PR makes political parties less, not more, beholden to the will of the electorate. It destroys any notion of transparency in politics. And it severely undermines the power of the electorate to give the government of the day a collective P45.

What's more, a system of proportional representation in the UK would see a hung Parliament at almost every election, in which Left-leaning coalitions would reign supreme. The Conservative Party would, in every meaningful sense, cease to be a viable political force in this country.

And so, David Cameron's greatest challenge is not getting into Number 10, it's not even securing a majority at the next General Election, it's saving his party and the country from PR. Regardless of whether he is able to agree terms with the Liberal Democrats, a possibility which has been dealt a blow by Mr Brown's intervention, he must as a matter of utmost urgency do all he can to publicly challenge the notion that PR produces a fairer system of government. But success in this endeavour will not be easy. It will involve a battle for hearts and minds of epic proportions. And Cameron will only succeed if his

campaign machine is running on all cylinders.

The Conservatives failed to deliver the goods on May 6, and if David Cameron does not learn the lessons of that failure, he may well find that his place in history is as the man who destroyed the Conservative Party as a political force in the UK and who delivered a Continental system of political mediocrity which does not befit the Mother of Parliaments.

Shane Greer is the executive editor of Total Politics and a leading political commentator.