It turns out that while David Cameron was dispatching the full might of his imperial outreach – six aircraft – to bomb ISIS, Nigel Farage was launching his own blitz on the Tories. The defection of Mark Reckless was not only a superbly choreographed piece of political theatre, it was a lethal blow to David Cameron, insofar as it is possible to deliver a fatal blow to a dead man walking. Future historians will study the demise – more accurately the suicide – of the Conservative Party with incredulous bafflement.
Tony Blair severely damaged the Tories but he did not destroy them. It was left to his self-proclaimed Heir, David Cameron, to deliver the coup de grace. Cameron will go down in history as the arrogant, serially incompetent, belief-free buffoon who extinguished the oldest surviving political culture in Europe. From its early incarnation in 1681 as the Tory Party, through its reinvention in 1832 under the Conservative label, the party of Disraeli and Churchill was an impressive force, formidable in government, resilient in defeat.
That resilience is no more. The auto-destruction of the Conservative Party began before Dave even won the leadership, when Theresa May announced the “modernising” agenda to the party conference. Addressing a hall full of people who had taken time off work or used up holiday entitlements, the kitten-heeled harridan strutted the stage as she told them that if they harboured all the instincts and principles traditionally regarded as Tory: “There is no room for you in our (sic) party.”
Her assumption that the Conservative Party belonged not to her audience and supporters in the wider community but to the platform party of ministers and their sycophants first exposed the fatal sense of entitlement that has brought the party to the verge of dissolution. It beggars belief that any political party could embrace the mantra “Lose 25 per cent to gain 50 per cent.” No party in history has worked tirelessly to divest itself of its core support. But Dave has done that.
Every initiative of his has combined fatuity with offensiveness. His ludicrous Big Society initiative, as the formal introduction to the policy brazenly declared, was based on the ideas of Saul Alinsky, a Marxist even too extreme for Marxists, whose seminal book was dedicated to Lucifer. This first blunder revealed not only how detached the Tory Party leadership had become from any form of conservative ideology, but how infantile its policies had become.
At the 2010 general election Dave could not even secure a parliamentary majority against Gordon Brown, whose popularity rating was lower than that of George III in Massachusetts in 1776, because he had already alienated so much of his natural support. Once they had achieved power, if such a term can be applied to a government shackled to the Liberal Democrat political eunuchs, the Bullingdon bullies became intoxicated with arrogance and entitlement.
Rural communities were the “Turnip Taleban”. The serial insults that followed showed the immeasurable contempt the Cameron clique felt for the people of Britain. Toryism once trusted the people; now it despises them, a trait that has persisted right up to Matthew Parris’s contemptuous advice to turn their backs on the people of Clacton and, by implication, every other betrayed, impoverished, conservative-minded community in the country.
The crass leadership does not even possess the urbanity and discretion of the old ruling class. Dave is the Queen’s fifth cousin, yet he could not resist bragging about how the sovereign “purred” when he told her the outcome of the Scottish referendum. Apparently Her Majesty does not have access to television or the internet at Balmoral, but relied on Dave to bring the good news from Aix to Ghent.
Speaking of Europe, Dave’s cast-iron guarantee of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and subsequent reneging on that promise has created a situation where nobody of any persuasion now believes a word he says. Apparently getting immigration down to “tens of thousands” annually means admitting 560,000 newcomers in a single year.
He has declared war not only on social conservatives but on his own parliamentary party by bulldozing same-sex marriage through against the votes of the majority of Conservative MPs. Then he thought it would be an impressive political coup to trash the English landscape with HS2, so that in 20 years time businessmen could reach Birmingham 20 minutes earlier (if there still are trains and business still favours Birmingham in that distant future).
It is a chilling thought that the cross-party consensus (more accurately conspiracy) whereby a single social democratic party sitting in three separate areas of the Commons chamber rules Britain in the interests of Europe and political correctness would have gone unchallenged but for the advent of UKIP. The Tory Party is a corpse. Nigel Farage has a duty, in the interests of public health, to sweep this road-kill off the path to the future.