The Tory modernisers’ project has reached completion

“The thunder had long grumbled in the air; and yet when the bolt fell, most of our party appeared as much surprised as if they had had no reason to expect it.” In those words, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the Tory leader and philosopher of Queen Anne’s reign, described the confusion and passivity with which his party allowed itself to be destroyed when the long-foreseen death of the Queen in 1714 enabled the Whigs to execute a coup d’état, on the model of 1688, and implement the Hanoverian succession.

In the subsequent general election of 1715 the Tories were reduced to 215 seats (a tally their successors would covet today) and were excluded from government for the ensuing 68 years. Yet, only five years earlier, the Tories had won an historic landslide in the general election of 1710, securing 350 seats out of 558 – a second Cavalier Parliament. They had then ended the war with France by the Treaty of Utrecht (the early 18th-century equivalent of “getting Brexit done”), but had succumbed to internal divisions, loss of principles and political ineptitude. Even before the election, Bolingbroke acknowledged the terminal state of his party, writing to Bishop Atterbury: “The grief of my soul is this: I see plainly that the Tory party is gone.”

History may not repeat itself identically, but on occasion it most certainly moves elliptically. If the Tory experience of 1714 does not speak eloquently to the grieving Tories of 2024, then they are even more lacking in insight and self-awareness than they have already shown themselves to be. Yet it is important to understand, despite some uncanny parallels, the unique character of the Tories’ latest defeat and the reason why it is terminal, a genuine extinction event.

The Tory Party was the oldest and most successful political culture in European history. It was founded in 1681, at the height of the Exclusion Bill crisis, to defend the legitimate succession to the throne, in favour of the Duke of York, later James II. Yet, just seven years later, the Earl of Danby, a nominal Tory, was one of the “Immortal Seven” traitors who signed the invitation to William of Orange to invade England.

Under Queen Anne, party splits over the recognition of the Elector of Hanover as heir to the throne, based on the Act of Settlement, which had passed the Commons by one vote and which vaulted over the first 53 heirs to the throne on the grounds of Catholicism, to install the 54th, represented the direct contradiction of the most basic Tory tenet. Yet some “Hanoverian Tories” supported it. Tory pragmatism was born.

These ancient political chronicles are highly relevant to today’s events, since the Tory pedigree is an historical continuum. The attempts by the historian Sir Lewis Namier to claim that the Tory Party which returned to power in 1783 was a different entity from the one overthrown in 1714 no longer commands credibility. Likewise, the notion that the “Conservative Party” – a name borrowed from French political science in 1830 by John Wilson Croker, the dubious political manager satirised as the character Rigby in Disraeli’s novel Coningsby – created a different party in the wake of the Reform Bill is unsustainable, since even the personnel were the same.

Tory history has become unfamiliar both to the present-day party and media commentators. The latter informed us, as the Tory defeats rolled in, that it was the party’s worst result since 1832. That is not the case: the Tories held 150 seats in 1832, compared with 121 in 2024. To find a worse result it is necessary to cite the 106 seats to which they were reduced in 1754. Unusually, during the recent catastrophe, few commentators cited the Corn Laws crisis – normally their first resort – despite the instructive parallels between today’s debacle and that event. 

Sir Robert Peel and his faction emerged from the Corn Laws schism with the “men of business” (“the adults in the room”, in modern parlance), the party machine and funds still at his disposal, but the Protectionist majority of the party reconstituting itself under Stanley and Bentinck. The last surviving Peelites merged with the Liberal Party in 1859.

The immediate post-Corn Laws era is the only previous occasion when Britain experienced something close to the simultaneous existence of two conservative parties, but the schism was less drastic than that: at the fatal general election of 1847 the Peelites and Protectionists refrained from standing against each other, except in 10 seats where political passions could not be contained.

Today is different: for the first time in British history, two conservative parties – the Tory rump and Reform UK – are competing for electoral support. That is why, this time, the defeat of the Tories is terminal: they will not be coming back, as they did 68 years after 1715, or 21 years after 1847 (disregarding several short-lived interim Tory administrations) when Disraeli became prime minister in 1868. By that time the Peelites were a distant memory.

With all that hinterland – and much more – the Tory Party might have been expected to possess the historical perspective, the experience and the philosophical grounding to maintain its political ascendancy. In reality, how many of the MPs who have taken the Conservative whip over the past two decades had the slightest awareness of their party’s heritage or adherence to its philosophy? Yet it was not simply a case of loss of historical memory: the Tory tradition was deliberately, forcefully, excised not only from the consciousness of contemporary Conservative politicians, but from the party’s programme.

Margaret Thatcher was rightly described, in her economic philosophy, as a 19th-century Manchester liberal. Beyond the economic sphere, however, she remained an instinctive Tory, as evidenced by her conduct of the Falklands War, when she conducted herself as the only man in her cabinet, while the Wet jellyfish in trousers who surrounded her grasped ineffectually at any pretext to surrender the islands to the aggressor, as the next instalment of Britain’s managed decline.

We saw the same mentality displayed in the Remainers’ attempt to thwart the public will over Brexit. Days before the recent election, it was in evidence again, as David Cameron attempted to cede control over Gibraltar airport to the Spanish authorities. It was appropriate that Cameron, the destroyer of the Tory Party, should reappear in the last months of its existence, like a memento mori. For the Conservative Party was not destroyed by the feeble opposition of Keir Starmer, who never laid a glove on it, but by its own leaders and the non-Tories they infiltrated into it.

What Britain witnessed on 4 July 2024 was the culmination of the Tory modernisers’ project. That aberration was the consequence of Tory politicians of limited ability, no principles and a total lack of imagination becoming mesmerised by the success of a flashy opponent – the Great Charlatan Tony Blair – and supposing that the imposture represented by that mountebank could be translated into a reinvention of the Conservative Party.

It followed upon John Major’s unwise commitment to the Europhile cause, branding his party’s Eurosceptics as “bastards”, which initiated the split that would become a fissiparous schism over time. The “modernising” initiative was heralded by Theresa May, in her conference speech in 2005, telling traditional Tories sceptical of multiculturalism, mass immigration and similar modish prescriptions: “There is no place for you in our (sic) Conservative Party.” That was the first intimation that the Conservative leadership regarded the party as its personal property, not the communal patrimony of its members and supporters.

Shortly after, Cameron became leader and the exercise in exponential fatuity began, exemplified by the abandonment of the tie, on the model of the Iranian revolution. The party managers even organised a fund-raising dinner at which the dress code (which could hardly, in the circumstances, be termed “black tie”) was dinner jacket and open-necked shirt. That marked the infantilisation of Tory politics.

With entry into coalition government in 2010, the irresponsibility escalated. Cameron gave Nick Clegg the monarchy to play with: a politically correct obsession with “equality” led Cameron and Clegg to recalibrate the royal succession on the back of an envelope, ending the male preference rule among siblings, in supposed deference to women’s rights (something both parties would subsequently trash with their “gender” policies). The royal succession, which the Tory Party was founded in 1681 to defend, was treated as a virtue signalling trifle of gesture politics.

Instead of implementing, successively, a royal commission, a green paper, a white paper, a nationwide consultation and possibly a referendum, a crucial change to the royal succession was nodded through without scrutiny. Yet the change introduced could result in three changes of dynasty per century: only the birth of Prince George (with some fanatics demanding retrospective legislation to exclude him – shades of 1681) prevented the problems becoming evident. If Cameron’s succession law had been in force at the death of Queen Victoria, after a six-month reign by her eldest daughter the Empress Frederick as Victoria II, on 5 August 1901 Kaiser Wilhelm II would have become King of Great Britain (nice one, Dave!).

The same recklessness caused the introduction of same-sex marriage, which homosexuals were not demanding, despite a majority of Tory MPs opposing it. The measure was passed due to Labour support; from this evolved the ascendancy of Stonewall, to which the Tories outsourced social policy, leading to all the gender conflict. Cameron revealed that he passed this measure on the insistence of his wife. Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative, which sank without trace, was based on the ideas of the American Saul Alinsky – a Trotskyite so extreme as to repel fellow Trots.

From that early buffoonery, the Conservative Party degenerated into more serious transgressions both of Tory principles and democracy. Cameron controlled candidate selection, preventing constituency associations from adopting authentic Tories and infiltrating “socially liberal” nonentities. One of his fast-tracked “A-list” candidates was Liz Truss: those locals who opposed her were ridiculed as “the Turnip Taliban”.

Cameron made no serious effort, pre-Referendum, to secure concessions from Brussels and was clearly astonished when the country, of which he knew nothing, dared to rebel against his instructions. For four years Conservative MPs led the charge in trying to reverse Brexit. Boris Johnson promised to “take back control of our borders” and used that control to open the floodgates to mass immigration. In the last two years of Conservative government, two and a half million immigrants entered this country, perfectly legally, an act of insanity on which Labour is planning to double down.

At three previous general elections the Conservatives had promised to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. Boris Johnson, again with a view to gaining a spouse’s approval, as commentators have acknowledged, embraced the Net Zero lunacy. His cake guzzling during lockdown ended his regime, followed in quick succession by the cartoon regimes of Liz Truss and the pathetic Rishi Sunak.

What characterised Conservative rule from 2010 to 2024 was relentless lying to the public, policies so unpopular as to be downright provocative, and mind-boggling incompetence. The voters did not want Labour: they used Starmer and his rabble as a blunt instrument to remove the Conservatives. They will next remove Labour, already committed to the most hated Tory policies – mass immigration, net zero and further tax rises.

That will not breathe life into the Tory corpse. Unlike 1783 and 1868, there will be no Tory return to government this time: there is only room for one conservative party and Reform UK, with a charismatic leader, with policies that are hugely popular in the country, with members and donors flocking to it, with five years to build a constituency-based infrastructure and to gain the confidence of the nation, has every prospect of defeating Labour, even under the first-past-the-post system, if Nigel Farage can build a mass movement and create a mood of post-legacy parties optimism.

On 4 July voters swept the Tory roadkill off the path to the future. The media will remain on tramlines, reporting Tory leadership contests – bald men squabbling over a comb – as if they still mattered. The Tory Party, through its own volition and self-indulgence, now belongs only in the past tense. Europe’s most enduring and successful political culture has finally liquidated itself. The Tory modernisers’ mission is complete.

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