Brexit betrayal is the final phase of calamitous Tory modernisation

Theresa May is that caricature figure, the dinner guest who has overstayed her welcome and will not take the hint to depart even when her hosts appear in the drawing room in night attire; recently she has further conformed to the cliché by producing the dreaded home movie.

It is hardly a dignified way for the oldest political culture in Europe, a party that first established itself in 1681, to exit history; but the inexorable reality is that the Tory Party is finally over. It has been caught in a perfect storm of its own creation. Bankrupt Corbynite Labour never laid a glove on it: the Conservative Party is the architect and author of its own self-immolation.

Amid the current tsunami of criticism and loathing inundating the Tory Party there is an instructive divergence between external critics and those who until recently were Conservatives – candidates, activists, members or voters. The former excoriate the Tories for their mishandling of Brexit; if they are leftists, they sometimes season their critique with a sideswipe at “austerity”, but that is as far as it goes.

In the case of betrayed Tory supporters, however, the criticism is much wider ranging, expressing a longstanding discontent with the leadership on issues far beyond Europe. On traditional Tory websites angry former activists are asking a multiplicity of questions that highlight the impassable gulf between them and their supposed leaders.

Why, under a Conservative administration, are primary school children to be subjected to age-inappropriate sexual propaganda against their parents’ wishes? Why, when knife crime is rife, are our politicized police harassing a journalist for use of a “wrong” pronoun? Why are boardrooms that have only lately recovered from the 2008 downturn being distracted by government promotion of gender quotas?

Why, for that matter, does a Conservative government align itself with large corporate interests rather than the needs of SMEs that generate the real wealth of the nation and pay their taxes in full? Why, after repeated pledges of reducing immigration to the “tens of thousands”, does the immigrant total rise relentlessly? Why do many MPs who wore blue rosettes to secure election arrogantly disparage and sneer at the communities that lent them their support?

The answers to these and myriad comparable questions furnish the explanation for the death of the Conservative Party. It is not a sudden death: the patient has been in decline for decades. There is a fitting historical symmetry, however, to the fact that the woman who is now presiding over the last agonies of Conservatism was also the first to initiate the process that has killed it.

When Theresa May, in her conference speech in 2002, coined the self-harming term “the nasty party” many commentators reproached her for that perceived gaffe. It was no gaffe, however: it was the beginning of the deliberate demonization of traditional Conservative values by careerist politicians untrammelled by any philosophy or principles and intimidated by the Blair electoral phenomenon into the conviction that only by imitating that mountebank could power be regained.

Theresa May’s speech at the 2005 conference, when she told a hall full of volunteers who had sacrificed several days of work or leisure to support the party, “There is no place for you in our [sic] Conservative Party…” if they clung to outdated Tory values, revealed how Conservatism In Name Only had become the approved stance. She and Francis Maude led the “modernisation” of the Conservative Party.

It is worth noting that this subversive movement was up and running when David Cameron was little more than a milk monitor in the Privy Council Office. On his election as Conservative leader in 2005 he eagerly grasped the torch of modernisation and ran with it.

Thereafter the Tory Party set about tearing up its roots, deliberately setting about alienating its traditional supporters – a kamikaze manoeuvre never attempted by any other political movement on earth. “Lose 25 per cent to gain 50 per cent” ran the suicidal mantra of modernization, in the fatuous delusion that if real Tories departed, former Labour voters would flood in to replace them.

The project worked a treat: the Tory party is not at risk of losing 25 per cent, more like 100 per cent. The parliamentary party more than pulled its weight in this endeavour, scorning their core constituency as a “Turnip Taliban” and performing spectacularly in the MPs’ expenses scandal when the duck-house proprietors and moat cleansers displayed their blokeish credentials to the electorate.

Under Cameron the casual discarding of constitutional conventions – which has reached a crescendo in recent days – began with the radical redefinition of marriage without the preliminaries of a royal commission or manifesto commitment, followed by the similarly casual alteration of the royal succession on the back of an envelope.

Theresa May as heir of Dave rounded off the whole squalid betrayal with an elegant symmetry. Conservative candidates – Oliver Letwin, Anna Soubry, et al. – assured voters of their resolve to respect the EU referendum outcome and implement Brexit, only to sabotage the process viciously and even at the expense of our ancient constitution. Lies became the shameless currency of Tory politicians. Besides vowing 108 times that Britain would leave the EU on 29 March, Theresa May continues to pledge to “deliver Brexit” when her sole ambition is to wreck it.

Forget alibis about May’s alleged “incompetence”: she is perfectly competent at achieving what has been her single-minded purpose since 24 June, 2016. She calculatingly constructed a “deal” so toxic that its sole consequence would be to render Brexit a shambles. Now she is attempting to graft onto it the further crippling impediment of a customs union. She has surprised commentators by looking serene and unruffled. Why would she be otherwise? Everything is going according to plan – a Remainer plan to derail Brexit.

Every day she gives a further provocation to the British electorate. Theresa No-Mates’ home movie, with its bogus informality and synthetic giggle, which seems to have inflamed the public more than any previous affront, gave the measure of this shameless Prime Minister.

Remedy there is none, not from the political eunuchs now occupying the Conservative Party. Remember all the dark mythology about the Men in Grey Suits, about the Conservative Party’s ruthless dispatch of leaders fallen out of favour? Never has the prompt removal of a maverick leader been more urgently needed, in the national interest rather than just that of the party, than today. The failure of Tory grandees to take the necessary action testifies to the non-viability of their party.

Why did the Conservatives, post-Cameron, install a Remainer leader, chancellor and cabinet? Because, after two decades of colonization by “socially liberal” (i.e. liberal tout court) opportunists, bereft of Tory principles, the moral core of the party which linked it symbiotically to the most traditional, patriotic and public-spirited elements of the British public had atrophied and decayed.

The Conservative Party is now in a persistent vegetative state; all that remains is for its betrayed supporters to euthanize it at the ballot box.