The leaving of the EU which these politicians did not want, and most of them sought to frustrate once the people surprised them with it, has been mulishly squandered. Real effort and determination was made, even to the brink, under the supremely incapable Theresa May, of almost prematurely destroying the party.

Luck as much as anything else saw them gain a leader obliged to once again campaign for the sort of Brexit no one should imagine Boris Johnson ever truly sought, still less expected.

 — failed to beat Liz Truss but nevertheless ended up prime minister. Peevish, entitled, cloth-eared and cheered on by the most pompous bores in the country.

Beloved as a “grown-up” by The Times, Sunak, from the groomed start to the catastrophically inept end of his political career, has been indulged where others would have been hysterically denounced by those who ululated over him.

A Chancellor, who wanted to be PM, whose wife was a non-dom and held onto a foreign state’s residency permit? Let us not be coy: Sunak benefitted here from an indulgence which would not have been given to any previous occupant of that offi ce, still less one with, say, Russian oligarchical in-laws.

His political career, which started at that forging house of Tory self-harm, Policy Exchange, should never have taken off, but it’s too late now to cry about that.

, and the central one offered to us is Thatcher-in-opposition. This, apparently, is how the Tories should get out of the mess they have got themselves into. They should do what she is supposed to have done.

There should be thinking, and think tanks, and thinkers, and beliefs, and coherence. This, to quote the great Tory thinker Maurice Cowling, is balls. As what there should be now in opposition is what there ought to have been in offi ce: bloodiness.

According to George Osborne, a pettish John Major told him soon after the 1997 election, when Major had brought the party to the brink of ruin, “We will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party.”

This Major said in private to account for his defeat. It was not his fault, but that of the mysterious “hard right” (who weren’t in his cabinet and whose prescriptions it didn’t follow).

Not one of his successors led the party from anything close to its “hard right” either. Nor can anyone honestly claim Cameron, May, the Johnson who governed and Sunak were “hard right”. This is a lot of historical weight to place on the 45 days of Truss and the leadership campaign of Iain Duncan Smith. As lies go, it is an insultingly transparent one.

wish to avoid responsibility for what they have done. It is less clear why anyone right-wing should extend this indulgence to them. The legacy of the 1997 left was no more unpicked by the 2010 24 Tories than that of the 1945 left was by the 1951 64 Conservative government.

In many ways, thanks especially to expansive judicial conceit and the lingering ravages of our immersion in a European legal order, the 2010 Equality Act that the Tories refused to change, allied to the Human Rights Act, will provide yet more solid bedrock for the premises of the left than the NHS and BBC have been.

To these, Labour will now add a Racial Equality Act and finally implement the socioeconomic rubric of their Equality Act. What will the Tory party offer in response to this? Nothing save capitulation and collaboration, unless they finally reject the language of the left.

The Tories offered incompetent managerial liberalism in an age too cold for its comforting delusions. They were saved at the start by the prosperity that China appeared to gift the world, then by a Brexit most of them hated.

Nothing will save them now, save finally disagreeing with everything they have done in offi ce. ●

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