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The Conservative Party is at a crossroads, and facing an electoral dilemma to which there may be no correct answer. Makerfield is fast shaping up to be the most consequential by-election in decades, potentially deciding the next prime minister- and it could be the election where the road ends for the Tories.

Engineered to hand the Mayor of Manchester a route to Parliament, and thereafter No 10, this by-election will create an impossible choice for Kemi Badenoch. Reform, having swept the local council seats in the area, stands a reasonable chance of victory. The Tory leader must now decide whether to field a candidate or not.

The trouble is that both options lead to disaster.

If they do as the party has always done and field a candidate, there is every likelihood that they will split the anti-Labour vote. Already, senior figures in the party, including former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, are calling for them to stand aside.

Splitting the vote will mean Burnham is returned to Westminster and rapidly moved into No 10. Yet devoid of a mandate for his ruinous Left-wing plans, such as nationalising everything with a vowel in it, he may soon have little choice but to call a general election.

The opinion polls make the most likely outcome of that general election extremely clear: the Conservatives would be obliterated. But if the Conservatives do not stand a candidate, the accusation of an electoral pact with Reform cannot be escaped.

It will cease to matter that no such agreement exists, as the absence of a Conservative candidate in a parliamentary by-election would be interpreted, rightly, as a de facto alliance. The party would quickly become tainted in the eyes of traditional conservative voters by association with Farage, whom they find unseemly.

Historians out there will see this for what it is: a modern iteration of Morton's Fork, so named after Cardinal Morton's method of tax collection under Henry VIII. If you live well, you clearly have money to spare. If you live frugally, you must have savings. Either way, you pay. Mrs Badenoch will likewise pay regardless of the choice she makes.

Her dilemma is compounded by the possibility that this is not solely about the choices of Makerfield voters. It is instead totemic of what the by-election represents - the final and complete collapse of an electoral strategy the Tories have relied on for decades.

The party has always been seen as the natural home for voters who, rather than wanting the Tories in, simply wish to keep Labour out. But now that understanding has a fatal fissure.

Reform has demonstrated it can win in Labour heartlands and give voice to those frustrated by the Left. In doing so, it has shown that the Conservatives can no longer claim to be the only viable alternative.

There is a sad truth that many within the Conservative Party know how they arrived at this point. They did not get here because they lost the last election. They got here because of years of infighting that perpetuated after they became such a big tent that the canopy collapsed.

Voters who saw the Conservative Party as a vehicle through which Labour might either be exorcised from power or prevented from obtaining it have moved on to Reform. The ones who are left are those who adhere to the values the party represents - social order, limited government, the family unit, tradition, the rule of law.

Labour, too, faces risks. If Burnham has over-egged the pudding and his own popularity is insufficient to foil Farage's candidate, then he is finished. Backbench Labour MPs will feverishly descend into despair.

If he wins, he inherits a Government for which he has no mandate to lead, and must surely trigger an election he has little hope of winning. But these are Labour's problems to navigate. The Conservatives' problem is that they have no good options whatsoever.

The paradox of Makerfield is that the least damaging choice may be to stand aside, absorb the accusation of a pact, and use the resulting crisis to force a reckoning within the party about its future relationship with Reform. Better an honest conversation now than death by a thousand cuts later. But this requires a level of strategic courage and unity that the Conservative Party has not often displayed.

What is certain is that Makerfield will be remembered not only as one upon which a Government's fortunes were decided, but one where the future of the most successful political party in the Western world was chosen. Either the Conservatives split the vote and handed Burnham his path to power, or they stood aside and accepted what that implied.

Neither outcome is comfortable. But in politics, as Cardinal Morton showed, sometimes every door leads to the same unhappy place.