Here lies the British Conservative party: killed by its own hypocrisy

Won’t someone call the undertakers?

Photo by Fey Marin on Unsplash

If Doctor Who appeared in his TARDIS and offered to take you back to any year in British history since Salisbury beat Gladstone in the general election of 1886, the odds are you would land in a Britain with the Conservative party in control.

The Tories, whose origins romantics trace back to the cavaliers who rallied to Charles I in 1642, ruled on their own or in coalition from 1886 to 1905 (with a small interruption for a minority Liberal government), and then from 1916 until 1945 (with two small interruptions for minority Labour governments), from 1951 until 1964, from 1979 until 1997, and from 2010 to 2024.

So many Tories, for so many years. It was as if they would stretch on to the end of time.

You may well loathe them – and if you didn’t in the past, the odds are that you did by the general election of 2024. But, and may God have mercy on these poor and luckless islands, they were a part of us –and of the rest of the world

For until the 1950s the British ruled a global empire. There are billions on this planet whose histories were shaped by the colonising and decolonising policies of Conservative governments.

And now the Conservatives, “the most successful political party in the world” are gone or all but gone.

One MP plotting against their leader – for Conservatives are always plotting against their leaders – tells this morning’s Sunday Times that, if the decline carries on for another year, the Tories will “cease to be a functioning party.”

Like the Republicans in the US, they wanted to be pro-business and offer rising living standards. But they also wanted to ride the populist tiger and win the votes of nationalist and occasionally racist reactionaries. These two aims contradicted each other, of course, and, in the end, the tiger devoured the party – as it was always going to.

To please the nationalist right, the Tories took the UK out of the EU. But that wrecked the UK’s economic prospects and infuriated moderate pro-business Conservatives, who have now moved back to Gladstone’s Liberal party.

To please business and boost GDP, the Conservative allowed mass migration. But that infuriated the nationalist right, and it has now gone off to Nigel Farage’s Trumpite Reform party.

The double dealing and hypocrisy of old Etonian snobs trying to incite nationalist mobs has produced an epic collapse.

I cannot overstate its scale.