Tory meltdown: Has Nigel Farage’s hour come at last?

The Tory Party was a great adventure, but it is over. From its remote origins in the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1679-81, through its reinvention in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act, rumours of the Conservative Party’s demise have repeatedly been discredited, garnering for it the reputation of being the longest surviving and most efficient mechanism of political power in world history. It has gained an aura of immortality and, with it, a false sense of security.

That hubris has undoubtedly contributed to its imminent dissolution. Even a cat has only nine lives and the Conservative Party has demonstrably, as used to be said of effete Chinese imperial dynasties, exhausted the mandate of Heaven. This time there will be no road back. That is not to say that a nominal Tory Party, in some attenuated form, will not linger on the benches at Westminster, like a ghostly revenant haunting the scenes of its past triumphs.

Much as the East India Company is rumoured still to survive as a dining club in Hamburg, a Tory contingent is likely to remain in the House of Commons, like the post-1924 Liberal Party; so enduring a political culture will not soon be liquidated, even in its sunset years it is likely to command several taxi-loads of MPs. Yet that stubborn survival will be politically irrelevant, since it is unlikely ever to govern again.

Anyone who imagines that Liz Truss is responsible for the demise of her party is gifted with very little discernment. The extinguishing of Toryism was a very prolonged process, involving a large number of actors. The essential characteristic that emerged in the post-Thatcher Conservative Party was disdain for the electorate, including the party membership. “They have nowhere else to go,” was the dismissive mantra of Tory grandees, whenever they implemented some policy that was diametrically opposed not only to the known wishes of the electorate, but to the false promises they had made to voters at election time.

Corruption was blown wide open in 2009 by the MPs’ expenses’ scandal. Future historians will recognise that moment as a watershed: the public trust forfeited then by politicians has never been recovered.

Any chance of rehabilitation was destroyed by the House of Commons’ shameless efforts to negate the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Tory MPs were involved in that anti-democratic exercise; some of them paid the price at the 2019 general election. By that time, the mantra “They have nowhere else to go” had become obsolete. UKIP forced the government to concede a referendum; the Brexit Party made sure its outcome was honoured. When Boris Johnson emerged as the Brexit champion, Nigel Farage stood down Brexit Party candidates to ensure a Conservative victory.

So, how has Conservative governance served the electorate? “Brexit is done”: in that case, why are EU officials permanent residents on British soil, interfering with the transit of goods from one part of the United Kingdom to another, across an imaginary border in the Irish Sea? Why are we still locked in “Brexit” negotiations with the EU, a body we withdrew from almost three years ago?

“We have taken back control of our borders.” They’re having a laugh, surely? Illegal Channel crossers so far this year are approaching 40,000 – 90 per cent of them male. Those who land are increasingly being accommodated in luxury hotels, as the Camelot Castle case demonstrated. The courts constantly frustrate any feeble attempts by the government to stem the tide. The dogs in the street know it is impossible to control migration while remaining under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). So, why will a Conservative government not leave the ECHR?

Why has a Conservative government given 1.1 million people visas this year, 466,000 of them to students and their families? Why, in the years of Tory rule since 2010, has net immigration exceeded 2 million? Why is Liz Truss, pursuing a trade deal with India, proposing to open the flood gates still further to a nation of 1.4 billion people? We do not even know the identity of the ECHR judge who blocked the first Rwanda flight. Is Britain a sovereign nation or not?

The so-called Points-Based System for immigration “control” sounds good: in reality, it is a recipe for open borders. Recent Tory plans to churn up the green belt for housing development reflect the underlying reality that 57 per cent of the drive for additional housing is due to immigration. The Tory attitude is: bring in as much cheap labour as possible, without regard to the consequences for health, education, housing, crime or community stability.

Law and order was once a pillar of Tory orthodoxy. In England and Wales in 2021/22, just 5.6 per cent of crimes reported to the police resulted in a charge or summons. But when it comes to “hate crime”, Plod is hyper-diligent, as when Surrey Police recently entered the house of a clergyman’s wife, without a warrant, and arrested her in front of her children (again without a warrant), removing all her electronic equipment – because someone had claimed to be offended by her views. Moscow-style policing, in Britain, in 2022. Just remind us which is the governing party? Oh, yes… that party.

Our woke police wear rainbow insignia on their uniforms and their patrol cars are similarly gaudy with the colours of a political movement. Our laws are influenced by Stonewall, our schools directed by Mermaids – 12 years into a Conservative government. The latest assault on free speech is the provision inserted into the Public Order Bill this week, preventing pro-life activists from giving women access to alternative information outside abortion clinics, a free expression that has resulted in a number of women changing their minds and choosing to have their babies after all. Some Conservative MPs voted for that anti-free speech measure.

Our tax burden is outrageous. If Liz Truss acted precipitately and high-handedly, without preparing market sentiment, in implementing tax cuts, the fundamental question is: why had previous Conservative administrations not reduced the burden when they had more scope to do so? What, for the past three decades, has gone wrong with the Tory Party? What is it for? Commentators and critics have offered a wide variety of explanations: Conservative MPs are liberals, they are Wets, they are cowards, they are Remainers… In many instances, there is some truth in all those charges.

But they do not get to the root of the matter, to the ideology that furnishes the unitary element across the whole party, that, in particular, explains the strange cult of Rishi Sunak. Why are his supporters so fanatically loyal to a man so recently rejected by the party membership? He is not inspiring or charismatic (except, perhaps, in juxtaposition with Liz Truss), so why the enduring allegiance?

For one simple reason: Sunak is the personification of Globalism and that is the cult to which the Conservative parliamentary party has succumbed. It is a cult with its back to the wall. Brexit was a heavy blow to the globalist project. Worse still was the pandemic, wreaking havoc with extravagantly extended global supply chains and forcing businesses to recalibrate and repatriate much of their support systems.

All supranational entities – the EU, the ECHR, the IMF, the WEF – all the forums in which politicians and bankers plot great resets, or mass surveillance systems, or mass migration have become the natural habitat of Conservatives deracinated from their native heath. It has put a glass wall between them and the British public. Globalism is a failed experiment: the Ukraine war and China’s menacing outreach have delivered the coup-de-grâce to its false promise.

The wave of the future will be national conservatism, but the Tory Party has placed itself outside that reformist force and looks increasingly irrelevant. Jeremy Hunt, the first candidate to be eliminated in the leadership election, is Prime Minister in all but name. He has, within days, brought Britain back within the discipline of know-our-place managed decline. Soon he will be speaking of “austerity”. Even the promised increase in the defence budget is a possible target – a classic example of Treasury orthodoxy – at a time when Russia is threatening nuclear war.

The Tories had an unexpected reprieve from extinction in 2019, when Boris Johnson emerged as their saviour, only to throw the game away. Now the Conservative Party is finally facing terminal dissolution. It has no beliefs, no intellect, no purpose and no contact with the nation it governs. Labour has a 36-point poll lead, but that is unsustainable. It is inconceivable that most of the people disillusioned with the Conservatives really want to vote Labour.

Nature abhors a vacuum and, as recent history has shown, the old British political axiom that a new party has no prospects no longer obtains. If Nigel Farage were to return to frontline politics, with a party machine at his disposal – the obvious candidate being the Reform Party – he would swiftly sweep the Tory roadkill aside and garner votes on an unprecedented scale. The object would not be to gain power but, firstly, to assume the leading role in Conservative politics.

Thereafter, pressure would build for an end to the first-past-the-post system. If that were to give way to some form of proportional representation, Britain would have seen its last Tory government. The mean-spirited refusal of the Tories, after 2019, to confer a peerage on Farage, whose political contribution merited it, now leaves them facing the possibility that, still free-range, their nemesis could return to challenge them again. We are in new times. So extreme is the Tory meltdown, formerly unthinkable metamorphoses in British public life are now perfectly conceivable. And if Farage declines, there will be someone else: that is how history works.

History is also the dimension in which the Conservative Party is now likely to have its being. It was given a remarkable reprieve in 2019, but proved itself incapable of seizing the initiative. Since 2010, it has presided over mounting state intervention, aggressive social liberalism unpalatable to its natural supporters, a damning attachment to the European Union and draconian reduction of freedom of expression, with people losing their jobs for stating the scientific fact that human beings cannot change sex.

The Conservative government has cut down our armed forces to derisory proportions, refused to invoke Article 16 against the Northern Ireland Protocol, refused to ditch the ECHR, raised our taxes to socialist levels and spent like Gordon Brown, opened our borders to all comers and imposed the Net Zero insanity. If, after so much recent financial turmoil, you want one totemic example of Tory delusion, it is the fact that HS2 is still on the agenda. Is it any wonder the Tories are about to go gentle into that good night?

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