Nothing Sunak or Hunt can do will save the Tories

Rishi Sunak is taking up space that might more profitably be occupied by a vacuum. This Conservative experiment in nonentity-politik has predictably failed, though Sunak’s incumbency is an appropriate prelude to the final demise of his party. Combined with the Dracula-style return of “Dave” Cameron, it makes a clear statement of the situation: there is nothing left, no ideas and no beliefs, no talent, the last dregs have been drained. It is over.

With around 11 months of time left to kill before the liquidation of a major British political culture, the Tories have little to do but play charades. Sunak is well suited to this: he resembles a dummy in a shop window which the assistants dress in a different outfit each day. Last week Rishi was tricked out as a Tory “moderniser”, a Remainer, an icon of the slogan “Forward to 2015”, presiding over a reunion of revenants from that era, headed by the leader of the Remain campaign, self-proclaimed Heir of Blair and epic loser, brought out of mothballs, ermined and re-presented as Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. 

Ahead of today’s budget, we were told to expect a radical transformation, after the window dressers have worked on the prime mannequin overnight. We were told to look out for Rishi the Thatcherite, the tax-cutter, the slayer of inflation, doing his nodding-donkey act as his chancellor, to repeated drum rolls, pulls out of the hat some anaemic and inadequate “tax breaks”, in lieu of the strategy that should have been pursued years ago. Insulated as the Tory parliamentary party is from the rest of the nation and the real world, is it conceivable that its MPs truly believe this transparent ploy will make the slightest bit of difference to the electorate’s resolve to terminate the Conservative Party at the next election?

Do the Tories not realise how pathetic they look, how much contempt they invite? So far, 56 realists have sufficiently wakened up to their predicament to announce they will not be standing at the next election, preferring not to wait for the humiliation of the returning officer announcing their congé by the electorate. For, beyond peradventure and make no mistake, this is the end for the Conservative Party. Its demise has often been predicted, then contradicted, in the past; but this time it is different.

The Tory tradition, which the recent party leaderships betrayed even before they subverted the country, has deep roots. Throughout English history, centuries before the birth of ideology, there were two competing pulses in public life, an almost submerged, but potent, continuum. If one were to ask an intelligent school history student what King John, Henry III, Richard II and Charles I had in common, the question might provoke bafflement; but if one then asked, in corollary, what attitudes united King John’s baronial opponents, Simon de Montfort, Henry IV and Oliver Cromwell, a pattern might be detected.

As memorably chronicled by historians such as Sir Keith Feiling, modern Toryism had its roots in the confrontation between Charles I and Parliament from around 1640. It did not develop a party organisation and identity until four decades later. The first written testimony to the phenomenon was recorded in an entry in the diary of Oliver Heywood, an English Presbyterian divine and controversialist, on 24 October, 1681: “A gentleman… had a red Ribband in his hat… he said it signifyed that he was a Tory, whats that sd. she? he ans. an Irish Rebel… I hear further since that… instead of Cavalier and Roundhead, now they are called Torys and Wiggs.”

As that account shows, the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1679-81, when the heirs of the Cromwellians attempted to exclude the Duke of York, later James II, from the throne on account of his Catholic faith, led their enemies to deride the latter-day Cavaliers as “Irish Papist rebels” – the implication of the Irish word tóiridhe – while they responded by mocking the Exclusionists as Whiggamores, meaning Scottish Covenanting rebels. In Scotland, until well into the 18^th century, the Tories retained their old name as the Cavalier Party.

Until very recently, speculation about the demise of the Tory Party was rare and virtually unknown on mainstream platforms. Tellingly, however, some commentators have begun to canvass the possibility of electoral wipe-out and the emergence of an alternative conservative party. One such piece appeared recently in The Telegraph. On 17 November, Professor Robert Tombs wrote an interesting analysis headed: “The unbreakable Tory alliance between Court and Country is finally shattering.”

The old names of Court and Country parties can be confusing, since they changed places in 1688. Under Charles II and James II the Tories were the Court Party, supporting royal policy, opposed by the Whigs, or Country Party, largely left outside the magic circle of governance; but after 1688, when the new monarchy became an instrument of the Whigs, they became the Court Party, with a brief Tory interlude between 1710 and 1714, after which the Tories were out of power until 1783. 

During that period in the wilderness the Tories, represented by anti-Government squires in the mould of Sir Roger de Coverley, were the Country Party. In modern times, after the Corn Laws crisis and reinvention under Disraeli, it is Professor Tombs’ contention that it was the peculiar genius of the Conservative Party to unite within itself elements of both the Court and Country Party – a persuasive argument, within certain limits.

Now, however, he believes: “The Tory balancing of Country and Court has collapsed. High taxes, mass immigration, projects like HS2 and hasty attempts to impose net zero flout Country Party feelings. So does indifference to nihilistic attacks on national history and culture, now visible in practically every school, museum and university in the land.”

That is obviously true. The Conservative Party has no discernible purpose other than to remain in government, but unlike any Court Party in the past it has no objectives beyond self-perpetuation. The actual functions of government, as Professor Tombs acknowledges, have been devolved to “quangos, international organisations, law courts and central banks”.

We have surrendered so much power to extra-national forces that we can no longer control our borders. The recent striking down of the Rwanda policy by the Supreme Court did not hinge on the ECHR, but on the spider’s web of international commitments into which we entered after the Second World War in very different circumstances. It was ill-considered treaty commitments that dragged us into the slaughterhouse of the First World War: we ought to have learned a lesson from that.

Sovereignty is under unprecedented attack and the Tories swarmed out of the Trojan Horse 13 years ago to open the gates. It is time to reassess the very concept of “international law”. Of course there must be rules regulating the conduct of nations, but law presumes a law-giver: in Britain it is the King in Parliament. There is no law-giver in international law, it is simply a collection of free and equal treaties from which all parties can withdraw. It is time to remind ourselves of that.

The history of the past 13 years of Tory rule has been unprecedented in its betrayal of Britain. A political party may fail to deliver on some of its manifesto commitments: voters take that for granted, it is already priced in by the electoral market. There are, however, limits. In every one of those 13 years the Conservatives promised to control immigration and on every occasion they increased it.

In 2016 the excuse of Brussels rules was removed: immigration increased. The Conservatives squealed that the ECHR was an obstacle to removing asylum seekers; yet, at the same time, the Sir Buftons on the Tory benches made a fetish out of preserving Britain’s ECHR membership and all the other foreign commitments that have negated our sovereignty.

So, if illegal immigration is an intractable problem, the obvious temporary solution is to cut legal immigration to compensate. Instead, the Tories have slashed the income requirement for visas to derisory levels and accelerated the importation of poorly qualified immigrants to provide cheap labour, while discouraging the indigenous population from working with feather-bedding benefits. Last year the Tories presided over net immigration of 606,000 people.

We no longer have a government in any meaningful sense. Our feral police forces have become a law unto themselves, decriminalising burglary and shop-lifting, while snuffing out free speech. Parents are excluded from any knowledge of what is being done to their children in our schools by demented race and trans fanatics. Our history is being trashed, and our literature censored. Our prisons and embassies fly the rainbow flag.

That is what 13 years of Tory rule have done to Britain. Professor Tombs concluded his analysis of the situation of the Conservative Party in these terms: “Its past successes, and arguably its justification as a political organisation, lie in the ability to reconcile Court elitism and Country populism. In 2019 it had a historic opportunity to do just that. It may never have such an opportunity again. What is fatal to a party is not failure, but a sense of betrayal.”

That observation mirrors the findings of a large international survey that was carried out not long ago, investigating voters’ interaction with political parties. Its flagship finding was that what most turns an electorate against a party is raised expectations subsequently dashed. That is precisely the situation of the now irretrievably doomed Tory Party.

So far today has been a comedy, with Jeremy Hunt distributing a few sweets to the kiddies, in the hope such largesse, from the organisation that has appropriated unprecedented amounts of the public’s money, locked it down, wrecked the economy, allowed the central bank to stoke inflation and handed over our country to the dark forces we see dominating London every weekend, will persuade people to vote Conservative next year. That scenario is so naif as to verge on the demented. It demonstrates that we have been governed not only by scoundrels but by fools.

It begins to look as if, at least until after the next election, the vehicle for liquidating the Tory Party will be Reform UK – it deprived the Conservatives of both seats at the recent by-elections, when its vote was larger than the Labour majority. Then Britain will find itself in the crucible of Labour government, oppressed by a party with probably the largest majority in British electoral history, leaving ample scope for internal splits.

It will be a time of poverty, humiliation and accelerated loss of freedom, but it is a trial this country must undergo if the electorate is finally to be persuaded to give a new conservative movement, at the subsequent general election, a first-past-the-post majority, after which there will never be another FPTP election. Nothing can confidently be predicted regarding politics over the next decade, save one certainty: the Tory Party will never govern again.

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