There is now no hope of survival for the Conservative Party

Probably the most clichéd axiom that journalists and commentators have traditionally learned while still on the nursery slopes of their profession is the ruthless will to survival of the Conservative Party and its legendary effectiveness in removing anybody, from the leader down, who threatens its grasp on power. St Thomas Aquinas defined self-preservation as the primary human instinct and it was always exceptionally well developed in the Tory Party.

So, where are the men in grey suits when they are more urgently needed than at any time in the party’s history? Why is one individual, a leader who has totally alienated herself from her erstwhile supporters, being permitted to kill off the Conservative Party? Instead of the grey-suited assassins of Tory folklore we see a colony of rabbits in the headlights goggling impotently while Theresa May provokes their mass cull. Future historians will find the chronicle of British Conservatism’s end times incomprehensible.

The Prime Minister has demonstrated one – and only one – accomplished skill: an uncanny capability to inflict lethal damage on her own party. From the point of view of anyone hostile to the Tory Party (a category that now encompasses around 95 per cent of the population) May is the gift that just keeps giving. On the day before the local elections she let it emerge that, in alliance with Jeremy Corbyn and his Marxist clique, she is preparing a further Brexit betrayal by bolting membership of the Customs Union onto her already toxic withdrawal agreement.

Nothing could be more calculated to infuriate the Tory shires and to impel the last volunteers to leave local constituency offices and put out the lights. How must Conservative council candidates feel after being stabbed in the back so callously by their leader? And what is this all about? It is about Theresa May’s monomania in stubbornly trying to ram through an appalling Brexit In Name Only so extravagant that even many Remainers oppose it.

Has this prime minister no sense of history, no awareness of the infamy that will attach to her name down through future decades? Her utterances are becoming downright ludicrous. Her response, before the House of Commons Liaison Committee, to questioning about her apparent capitulation on the Customs Union – “It depends what your definition of a customs union is” – had a resonance of Bill Clinton’s “It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

Timing the sacking of the Defence Secretary, which further diminished the Government’s vestigial credibility, on the eve of the local elections again demonstrated May’s infallible instinct for self-harm. Leaking information from the National Security Council has to be a sacking offence. Sceptics might wonder, however, who has done more harm to national security: Williamson by allegedly leaking which ministers were pro and anti-Huawei, or May by giving Chairman Xi convenient access to the 5G network?

In the terminal situation in which Theresa May has placed the Conservative Party – with its cowardly acquiescence – it is surreal to hear media speculation about runners and riders in the Tory leadership stakes to succeed her. The metropolitan-based media are simply doing what they have always done: obsessing over a Conservative leadership contest, in the blinkered assumption that things are as they have always been and the Tory Party remains one of the two main parties of state.

In reality, Conservative leadership contenders are bald men fighting for possession of a comb. By the time another bland, politically correct, “centre-right” android enters into his inheritance there will effectively be no Conservative Party for him to lead. There is no force on earth that could now save the Tories from extinction as a political force. Some will linger on at Westminster, figures of curiosity like the last National Liberals, but it looks as though there will never again be a Conservative government.

The Tories have shown democracy is not safe in their hands. By defying the outcome of the largest democratic exercise in British history they have proved themselves unfit to be entrusted with power. In their blind entitlement they broke the constitutional compact with the electorate at precisely the moment when, across Europe, the dustbin of history is crammed full with similar legacy parties.

They calculated that UKIP was a spent force, so they could return to taking their voters for granted. The old adage of Tory grandees “They have nowhere else to go” regained currency. Unfortunately for those arrogant anti-democrats, so did Nigel Farage. Even when the Brexit Party first surfaced the Tories took false comfort in the notion it was a one-trick pony, focused exclusively on Brexit.

Farage, however, has made it clear his party is about more than Brexit: it is about effecting a political revolution and burying the old two-party system. That programme is a perfect fit with the aspirations of Britain’s aggrieved voters. Farage will destroy the Conservative Party and make inroads into Labour support. Unfortunately, that preliminary move at the next general election is liable to put an openly Marxist government into power.

While immensely damaging to Britain, that is a fire the country may have to go through, allowing the Reds definitively to demonstrate their total incapacity, leading in turn to the demise of the Labour Party. If he has the stamina for the long march, the post-Corbyn era is when Farage and a truly conservative and national party could inherit the earth.

None of this had to happen, if the Conservative Party had kept faith with its philosophy and its natural constituency. Its slow alienation from its supporters began over two decades – before Brexit was serious politics. The “modernisation” agenda was the beginning of the decline and Theresa May was in the lead there too: remember her 2002 (“nasty party”) and 2005 conference speeches. The Brexit betrayal was the last straw. There will be no road back.

Even now, so close to the end, media and commentators cannot bring themselves to realise that an institution so fundamental to public life for more than three centuries is finally defunct. The political class and the other elites like to talk about “change”, but when it actually occurs they are slow to adapt. Labour should take scant comfort from the demise of their opponents, since the same forces similarly guarantee their dissolution, albeit over a slightly longer time scale. “Strong and stable…” “Nothing has changed…” Don’t you believe it, Theresa.