The Tory party has lost its sense of self-preservation

Theresa May is taking up space that might more profitably be occupied by a vacuum. Where there should be a British government there is a void. No commentator – not even historians – can identify any comparable paralysis of government. Tory journalists have stopped invoking the Corn Laws crisis, in the recognition that the current debacle is more serious, compromising the constitution and interests of the whole nation rather than a single class.

The plain truth, increasingly apparent to the entire country, is that the present political class and system of governance are no longer viable. Last Wednesday evening 200 Conservative members of Parliament completed ballot papers endorsing the proposition: “I have confidence in Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party.”

That was a basic intelligence test: they failed. What low level of intellect must anyone possess to have confidence in Theresa May – to lead the anti-dog fouling sub-committee of Stoke Poges parish council, let alone the Conservative Party and government? Granted the majority of back-benchers voted against May, one might have thought the Cabinet and payroll vote would have had sufficient sense of self-preservation to terminate May before she terminates the Conservative Party.

There is no power or patronage at the disposal of a party that renders itself unelectable. Yet that is what the Tory lemmings are doing. The grisly dance of death in which MPs are engaged is the absolute antithesis of the traditional Tory instinct to retain power and remain in business at all costs, including extravagant pragmatism. What has so radically changed the Conservative leadership? That is a question which will be pored over by generations of future historians, but in the public interest it needs to be unravelled now.

The important point to recognize is that, contrary to the near-universal assumption, the internal Tory crisis does not have its roots in the controversy over EU membership. The schism over Europe was, of course, a factor; but it was not the driver of the events that have brought the Conservative Party to the verge of dissolution. The other startling fact is that, despite her intrinsic triviality, Theresa May was, by a peculiar historical symmetry, one of the prime movers in the original process that initiated the Conservatives’ long march towards disintegration.

The starting gun was fired by Theresa May in her speech to the Conservative conference in 2002 when she told delegates: “You know what some people call us: the nasty party.” Apart from handing her party’s opponents a bespoke slander, that marked the beginning of the attempt by the “modernizers” to brainwash the grassroots into feeling embarrassed about their conservative instincts.

It mattered not that the people calling the Tories nasty were demented leftist columnists suffering from the mental affliction of Toynbeeitis: it was to that faction that virtue signals were, futilely, to be directed. Then, at the 2005 conference, came May’s kitten-heeled harangue, telling social conservatives (caricatured for the purpose): “There is no place for you in our [sic] Conservative Party.”

The modernizers actually wanted an exodus of traditional Tories. In the circles around May and Francis Maude the insane mantra “Lose 25 per cent to gain 50 per cent” was rehearsed. The Conservatives became the first political party in history to attempt to shed support. In that they were successful; stage two, the gaining of 50 per cent, still eludes them. Nigel Farage and UKIP were the beneficiaries and that was the point at which the doomed “modernizing” project collided with Euroscepticism, since what is now called Brexit was UKIP’s flagship objective.

The significant factor in all this was Theresa May’s active participation, her fundamentally un-Tory mentality and her unerring instinct to pursue an auto-destructive course. The irony is that the progressive deterioration of the Conservative Party was a consequence of its traditional recourse to self-reinvention in opposition. The problem was that this reinvention was carried out not by a Disraeli, but by a succession of second-rate pragmatists with no inspiration beyond following the Zeitgeist, which at that time was dictated by Tony Blair.

The end product is today’s philosophy-free Conservative Party, tolerant of crony capitalism and “socially liberal” – a toxic combination to many traditional Tory voters. The party, over two decades, by a process of osmosis, has become absorbed into the globalist liberal consensus. That is the failed worldview that is now facing ferocious and unremitting insurgency across the developed nations. Brexit is just its British manifestation. With the minority exception of the European Reform Group, the Tory Party, which ought to be the solution, is part of this problem.

The problem is epitomized by the EU. Nation states must give way to unrestricted immigration and governance by supranational authorities allied with global corporations. Culture and identity are of no consequence, nations are no more than destinations for pools of cheap labour, their populations must be gulled and anaesthetized into compliance with the global agenda.

That is the mentality behind the Remainer faction and it is in control of the Conservative Party and the other legacy parties at Westminster. It regards the ordinary people of Britain as the problem: their vestigial attachment to national identity misled them onto the wrong side of history by voting for Brexit. They must be made to recant, either Irish-style by a second, forelock-tugging referendum in which they give the right answer, or by foisting upon them a May-style “deal”.

From the instant the referendum result was known, much of the British political class, across party lines, sought to contain Brexit by creating two ridiculous canards: that a WTO exit, demonized as “cliff-edge”, was not an option; and that it was out of the question to have a “hard” (i.e. normal international) border on the island of Ireland. The complicity of Theresa May and her government in promoting this mythology signalled their Remain commitment.

Recently Remainers have been emboldened to talk openly of “stopping Brexit”. Anyone who even contemplates such a course, in defiance of the will of 17.4 million voters, forfeits all claim to believe in any kind of democracy. Anyone who imagines the people of Britain would tolerate the cancellation of Brexit or an insulting attempt to force them to vote again and deliver an answer more palatable to the elites, is totally deluded.

Westminster is now wholly divorced from the public. The sheer length of the Brexit process means that time has overtaken Remainers and exposed the fragility of their “secure” EU. The dire picture Emmanuel Macron paints of a WTO Brexit is now less alarming than daily life in his own country, in revolt against the globalist liberal consensus.

The Conservative leadership is courting annihilation in defence of a principle – Remain – that is extravagantly un-Tory. If the Conservatives do not ditch May very soon, their party will be beyond rescue. They take spurious comfort from opinion polls that do not yet record their approaching demise: they entered the last general election with a 22-point poll lead. Their one slim hope is to sack Theresa May, elect a pro-Brexit prime minister, make hectic preparations and renounce the EU and all its works and pomps via a WTO Brexit. But do not hold your breath.