The Tory party no longer exists – and its husk will be butchered at the next election

“The Tory Party, as such, is extinguished,” exulted the Whig lawyer Henry Cockburn, following the passing of the 1832 Reform Act. Although the subsequent general election appeared to vindicate that judgement, there have been 22 Tory prime ministers since that utterance (most of them, it sometimes seems, within the past five years), demonstrating the unwisdom of making premature announcements of the death of the Tory Party.

Yet no political entity is immortal and never before, in its long history since 1681, has the Tory Party looked more doomed to extinction. A political movement seldom succumbs permanently to the attacks of its opponents, though it may suffer temporary eclipse: what is lethal is an internal malaise that destroys a party from within, which is very evidently the case with the Conservative Party today. It is not being killed off by its feeble and inept opponents: it is committing suicide.

More accurately, the Conservative Party, as such – to employ Cockburn’s qualification – no longer exists. There is only a surviving rump of Tories in the House of Commons, bunched into an archipelago of ideological groupings – the ERG, the Covid Recovery Group, the Common Sense Group – with sometimes overlapping memberships. The Common Sense Group, which comes closest to authentic Toryism, musters 59 MPs out of 355 Conservative parliamentarians; the ERG has around 46 members, though its influence is disproportionate to those core numbers.

Including Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is a kind of one-man personification of the historical Tory Party, the total number of MPs professing traditional Tory beliefs cannot credibly be assessed at more than 100, and that is a generous estimate. So, under a nominally Conservative government, slightly fewer than 30 per cent of Tory MPs can be considered authentic Conservatives; as a proportion of the 650 MPs composing the House of Commons, that amounts to a derisory representation of the political philosophy that most closely corresponds with the broad outlook of a majority of the public.

The root cause of the party’s current malaise is not Boris guzzling cake during lockdown, nor the controversial fiscal arrangements of Conservative ministers, but something much more radical: the fissiparous divide between the Conservative Party and the people of Britain, with whom it formerly had an intuitive sympathy. It is no longer a Conservative Party, but a bunch of globalist, philosophically illiterate technocrats, living from day to day, with no guiding principles or ideals.

Future historians will trace the origins of the Tory meltdown to 2005. While the party had lost its way under John Major and the failed leaders who followed, it was largely the victim of a political cycle, of a Labour leadership skilled in PR and internal discipline, and of incompetence – all problems that would have been resolved in the fullness of time. From the election of David Cameron as leader in 2005, however, the Conservative Party embarked upon a process of auto-destruction, the final consequences of which we are only now witnessing.

Cameron did not have a Tory bone in his body; indeed, he frequently showed himself hostile to authentic Toryism. To fill this ideological vacuum he turned to Tony Blair, to whom he and George Osborne referred reverently as “The Master”. Cameron, a bear of little brain, then embraced the fatuous scheme of turning the Conservative Party into the heirs of Blair. In the same spirit of cultural nihilism as his mentor, Cameron set about redefining marriage – something that was in no way the business of the state, especially a Conservative state. Since the majority of his MPs opposed same-sex marriage, for which there was no demand even by lobby groups, Cameron relied on Labour MPs to process legislation repugnant to his own party membership.

It was an iconic expression of the contempt felt by the leadership for the Tory faithful. The failure of the parliamentary party to remove Cameron signalled a revolution in power in favour of the party leader. That power was amplified by gerrymandering devices such as the “A-List”, designed to ensure the selection of metropolitan globalists rather than genuine Conservatives with a local base. The predominance of CCHQ over local associations was expressed in contemptuous terminology such as “Turnip Taliban”, in reference to the Tory electorate. This was never going to end well.

Still, there was one policy area where the Conservatives claimed to stand for a coherent principle. When challenged on their views on Tory philosophy, MPs for whom names such as Bolingbroke, Burke and Salisbury have no resonance, will desperately gabble about “markets”. It is true that the Conservative Party has traditionally championed the free market. During the post-War years, when the Soviet Union pretended to convert the Marxist delusion into a working “command economy” and UK Labour was infatuated with nationalisation, making the case for markets was an important Conservative priority.

That argument was won by Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, her success was distorted through the prism of a supposed political philosophy called “Thatcherism”. There was no such ideology: Margaret Thatcher was a pragmatist. Because she came into office at a time when trade union power had degenerated into tyranny and the economy was being stifled by high taxation, the remedies she introduced were fetishised as prescriptions by her admirers.

Margaret Thatcher’s natural sympathies were with SMEs: she had grown up above the shop, the daughter of a Grantham grocer. But today’s Conservative Party has nothing to say to SMEs. Today’s Conservatism is espoused to crony capitalism, to promoting the interests of woke corporations, at the expense of controlled immigration and small business. Rishi Sunak is Davos Man, than which there is nothing more antipathetic to the Tory tradition.

A caricature version of Margaret Thatcher’s policies became a spurious legacy, promoted by extreme libertarians. Libertarianism is incompatible with Toryism. But Mrs Thatcher was a bona fide Tory, albeit of a Peelite complexion, owing something to the 19th-century Manchester School of economics, yet, as her reaction to crises such as the Falklands War demonstrated, ultimately a Tory patriot. She was also, as that challenge proved, the only man in her cabinet. Already, the post-War delusions of managed decline, of acceptance of reduced world status, were making deep inroads into the mentality of the Conservative parliamentary party.

The natural home for that lukewarm Britishness was the integrationist European Community and, from the shameful premiership of Edward Heath onwards, the United Kingdom was increasingly subjugated to the Brussels empire, until it all became too much even for the phlegmatic, long-suffering British. It says everything about how far the Tory leadership had lost its way that, in the EU referendum, the Conservative prime minister belonged to the Remain camp.

All of that was susceptible to repair. By lunchtime on 24 June 2016 most Leave voters had returned to their everyday preoccupations, in the belief that the Brexit issue had finally been put to bed and all that remained was to implement the popular decision in traditional British style. What did irreparable damage was the discovery that their own elected representatives in the House of Commons, many of them prominent Conservatives, were prepared to reduce the political system to anarchy, in an attempt to overrule the popular will, as expressed in a democratic referendum.

History, unpredictable as ever, threw the Tories one last lifeline: victory in the 2019 general election. Beyond that, the collapse of Labour’s Red Wall offered Boris Johnson and the Conservatives a watershed moment, an opportunity to recalibrate the entire electoral landscape and ensure power for at least 20 years. But, of course, the degenerate Tories were not up to the challenge, Boris had always been soft on immigration, so the chief Red Wall priority was contemptuously rejected while the small boats congested the Channel.

The Brexit opportunity for Britain to become Singapore-on-Thames was similarly rejected. The embedding of EU bureaucracy in Britain via the Northern Ireland Protocol, a Gordian knot that should have been cut, through the instrumentality of Article 16, has been left to fester, with a border down the Irish Sea and Northern Ireland being welded onto the Irish Republic. Everyone expects that the outcome of the latest negotiations, with even the dotard in the White House intruding his views, will be another supine surrender by Britain.

Immigration, the number one concern of voters, is a stampede of incomers, assisted by the woke British bureaucracy. Is Rishi Sunak seriously committed to reclaiming control of Britain’s borders? Hardly, when the dogs in the street know that, if his parliamentary colleagues had not assassinated Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Sunak would now be living in California. The Conservative Party is controlled by a cosmopolitan, globalist plutocracy. The Zahawi scandal brings back memories of Sunak’s wife’s tax immunity. How much empathy can a Red Wall – or even a Blue Wall – voter feel with these offshore plutocrats?

Economic competence – the great Tory trump card? Responsible stewardship of taxpayers’ money? Last month alone, the government spent £17.4bn on repaying debt interest – public money fulfilling no constructive use. In total the government borrowed a further £27.4bn, while public-sector debt passed £2.5 trillion, or 99.5 per cent of GDP. At the same time, inheritance tax – the most un-Tory tax ever devised – is on track in 2021-22 to exceed the record ££6.1bn wrested from the hands of the bereaved in the previous tax year.

But it is the culture that is the ultimate victim. Under a supposedly Conservative government, freedom of expression has been curtailed to totalitarian levels. People nervously police their vocabulary before giving utterance, making a mockery of the sacrifice made by the countless thousands of names engraved on war memorials across the country. The Tories are making a virtue of stepping back from imposing a Draconian ban on so-called “conversion therapy” for trans candidates. But they are going ahead with a similar ban in the context of homosexuals.

What on earth business is it of the state – especially a Conservative state – what clinical, psychological or religious resources people with unwanted same-sex attraction may wish to avail themselves of? All the potentially harmful treatments, electrical shocks, etc are already illegal. We are talking about cognitive therapy: if the state can deny patients the help they want, we do not live in a free society. But of course we don’t. Policy is dictated by Stonewall and similar lobby groups, and executed by the woke civil service. The only role of the Tory wimps is to go through the division lobbies, approving ever more legislation to enforce this dystopian nightmare.

It is impossible to project oneself into the mind of any Tory MP who imagines his party, which has betrayed every principle it once stood for, has a snowflake’s chance in hell of being re-elected, either in 2024 or 2124. Who in the world do the Tories think is going to vote for them? But wait: they have a cunning plan. Conservative candidates are being given diversity training in “white resentment” (“when white employees suggest equality and diversity training is no longer required”). It is doubtful that Tory candidates need any training in rejecting the concerns of ordinary voters – they have done so consistently for nearly 20 years – but it is instructive to see they have no intention of making any concessions to non-woke opinion, even in the context of an election.

There has never been anything like this before, anywhere: a political party, in a pluralist society, relentlessly, year after year, lying to and defying its own supporters, trashing their most cherished beliefs and aspirations. There is a unique opportunity here for the Farage/Tice axis to annihilate the Tory Party, which is sick unto death. The kind of political revolution that, in any other circumstances, would be unimaginable is now perfectly possible. The Tories’ opponents have never laid a serious glove on them – they did all this to themselves.

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