Swiss cuckoo schemes seal the doomed Tories’ fate

It is curious, considering that we live in a so-called information society with unprecedented levels of communication, that a significant group of people engaged in public life should know so little about the society in which they live. Yet it daily becomes more obvious that the Conservative Party exists in total isolation from the sentiments of the nation it governs.

The Tory Party is on death row, but even in that antechamber to extinction it remains preoccupied with the projects of entitled hubris that have paved its path towards the dustbin of history. If you thought the departure of Anna Soubry to spend more time with her bruised ego and the simultaneous exit from Parliament of other aspiring referendum blockers meant that the Conservative Party was now a Brexit-compliant institution, you would be wrong. Remain runs through its core like a stick of rock.

Boris Johnson imposed a patina of buccaneering Brexiteer enthusiasm on his party, with the ERG as supporting cast. Like everything else in post-1990 Conservatism, it was an illusion. The hard core of the parliamentary party remains in thrall to managed decline, Treasury orthodoxy (a euphemism for plotting a surreptitious route back into the EU) and big-state technocratic governance.

In pursuit of that settlement, the Deep Party defenestrated Boris Johnson – a spendthrift socialist prime minister, but the only Tory leader who could have won the next election – and then Liz Truss. The enthronement of Rishi Sunak held a totemic significance for the men in grey suits, since they had anointed him, but the despised membership had presumed to defy their wishes and must be reminded who are the masters.

“The grown-ups are back” was the smug, entitled, elitist mantra that hailed the return to power of the social democratic decline managers. The next item on the agenda was to reactivate the gradualist process of reintegration of Britain into the Single Market, then into the other institutions of the EU, leading eventually to the British, in a Burghers of Calais ritual humiliation role, humbly petitioning for readmission to the European Union. An obvious first step was to try to sell a “Swiss-style” relationship for Britain with the EU.

Why? Why on earth would we want that, when the EU is relentlessly detaching Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, with the complicity of the Conservative government? Brussels has succeeded in making Northern Ireland ungovernable which, in collusion with the Irish Republic, was its intention when it imposed the Northern Ireland Protocol. The government has further aggravated the situation by riding roughshod over devolution and imposing an extreme liberal abortion regime on Northern Ireland which is abhorrent to both traditions in the socially conservative province.

Under a Tory government, Northern Ireland is daily drifting towards Irish unification which, in the current political climate, means towards Sinn Fein rule. Anyone who imagines the Loyalist paramilitaries would not take up arms against such an outcome is living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. “But there would be a referendum first.” Yes, and having seen how precarious a referendum result can be in an unarmed political culture on mainland Britain, such invocation of plebiscite outcomes seems unpersuasive.

All the hypocritical outcry about preserving the Good Friday Agreement, cheer-led by an American Democrat Irish caucus living in an 1860s fantasy of Fenian nationalism, is leading inexorably to the opposite outcome. Rumours of imminent agreement on fine-tuning the NI Protocol illustrate the continuing supine posture of the Tories towards Brussels.

The irony is that there is a Brussels-endorsed remedy for just such a situation as the Protocol has provoked: Article 16. Yet the Government shies away from this legitimate resort, while the United Kingdom is falling apart, riven by a border down the Irish Sea. The train is on fire, but the Tories will not pull the communication cord.

The same applies to the Government’s refusal to withdraw from the ECHR. Any commitment to end illegal immigration is meaningless – is, in fact, a lie – so long as Britain remains subject to the European Court. The Tories are committing suicide. They are set on increasing legal immigration, in the false belief that it helps growth, to the fury of the public. Liz Truss supported that deluded policy, as does Rishi Sunak, though he tries to camouflage the fact. The CBI – an organisation that has consistently been wrong about everything for the past two decades – is pressing for higher immigration rates.

Have they any conception how this is being viewed, not just in the Red Wall seats, but across the entire country? A bitter, but controlled, anger has taken hold at the countless outrages to public opinion, the woke excesses, particularly of the politicised police, the economic incompetence, the Remainer obtuseness, the immigration crisis, all aggregating to form an implacable resolution: this party must be removed from power at the earliest opportunity and never be permitted to govern again.

That last element is novel and significant. Writing recently in the Daily Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs correctly identified the existential threat to the Conservative Party at the next election: that losing the election, for which many Tories are prepared, could also lead to the collapse of “the entire centre-Right ecosystem that supports it – volunteers, donors, think tanks…”

That is precisely right. All that is needed is for a determined effort by, say, Reform UK, with Nigel Farage back at the helm, coinciding with monumentally low Conservative polling, a conjunction in which the dam of the first-past-the-post system could burst. There is a tipping point beyond which even FPTP could not save the Tories and if they lose in 2024 it will be, for them, the end of history.

So, gentlemen, plot on with your Swiss-style EU projects (which would not be Swiss at all, but a more subordinate arrangement), your abandonment of Northern Ireland (whose loss would inevitably be followed by the departure of Scotland) and your schemes to introduce vast numbers of new immigrants into our overcrowded island, to please your cronies in the CBI. You have two more years to play in the parliamentary sandpit, until the electorate calls time.

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