DURING the 1983 general election campaign, then foreign secretary and famous Tory wet Francis Pym said in an interview that landslide victories – which the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher was heading towards – were not necessarily a good thing for the country, largely because they removed the need for the government to seek consensus.

Understandably, as soon as the landslide was in the bag, Mr Pym was sacked by Mrs Thatcher for such heretical and off-message talk.

Thirty-four years later, another female Tory prime minister is leading her party towards an almost inevitable landslide victory. Come June 9, it is forecast by the pollsters (who famously never get these things wrong) that the Conservative majority could surge to around 150, with the party having some 400 seats in parliament. A landslide indeed, by anyone’s estimation.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn looks almost certain to be wiped out in large swathes of their traditional heartlands – and the results in Scotland and Wales are widely predicted to be completely disastrous. Even Labour under Michael Foot never looked quite this bad, not least because Foot was a great intellect, skilled orator and had held high office – none of which can be said for Jeremy Corbyn.

To compound the Labour party’s (if not Mr Corbyn’s) misery, the Communist Party of Great Britain has announced that it will field no candidates for this election (the first time in more than a century), because with Corbyn at the helm of Labour, there is no need: he, Corbyn, will achieve the Communists’ “revolutionary” aims without the need of their help. How many Labour MPs must have their heads in their hands as they consider what is about to be wreaked upon their party – and their own careers – on June 8. A lot of them will indeed be invoking the memory of Francis Pym.

A couple of months ago in this column, on the eve of the Copeland by-election, I said that the Conservative party was experiencing whatever is the opposite of a perfect storm. Labour’s disarray (including their leader’s anti-nuclear stance, that being a by-election in the constituency which houses Sellafied); Ukip’s busted flush; and the 2015 effective parliamentary wipe-out of the Lib Dems, all coming together to give the Conservative their best chance ever of taking this traditionally Labour seat. They did. And with a sizeable majority.

The Copeland result is now surely set to be repeated on a national scale – and then some. For those of us who believe the country would head towards certain disaster under a Labour Party with Jeremy Corbyn at the helm (and that includes many of his own MPs), a Conservative victory must be seen as the right result in June. Barring miracles, Jeremy Corbyn is no more likely to pull off his own personal Trump moment, than Marine Le Pen is to become the next French president. It simply can’t happen.

To give him his due, Mr Corbyn remains largely upbeat about his impending electoral disaster – apart from when he gets visibly irritated by television interviewers’ impertinent questions about what he feels about Isil or the nuclear question.

This week he was photographed grinning underneath his wisteria like a man with the keys to Number 10 as good as in his pocket. Such is the self-belief – deluded or otherwise – of some of our politicians these days.

Within the next couple of weeks, when all the parties have their candidates in place, the campaign will well and truly get going; and we can look forward to endless electioneering and punditry. Quite how well this will all go down with an election-weary population is not difficult to guess. Brenda from Bristol with her “You’re joking! Not another one!” response to being told there was to be another election, summed up the feelings of hundreds of thousands – if not millions.

No-one is going to win big by betting on a Tory majority, let alone a landslide. The only punt worth taking is on how low the turnout on June 8 is going to be.