Why has the Conservative Party collapsed ?

It was Brexit wot did it. As a fervent Remainer you’d expect me to say that but it’s 100% true. Cameron was in the One Nation Tory tradition, even moving almost Centre-Left in coalition with the LibDems. The Tory Right didn’t like that – look at their anger on Lord Ashcroft’s “Conservative Home” website during the coalition years.

In 2015 Cameron employed the brilliant Australian political guru Lynton Crosby to ditch the LibDems (the “barnacles on the boat” Crosby called them). The trick was to appeal to the mostly Eurosceptic Right Wing Conservatives by offering a Referendum on EU membership. This united a fracturing party, the LibDems were obliterated and Cameron got his majority. Thanks Lynton mate…!

But Dave had to honour his Referendum promise, blew it and walked off into the sunset. Party and governance chaos followed the Referendum disaster. But the Conservatives had two huge bits of luck. Labour had chosen the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn as Leader and Johnson, having pragmatically chosen the “Leave” campaign in the Referendum, plotted to oust the struggling Theresa May and succeeded.

The 2019 Boris election win, substantial though it was, became a Pyrrhic victory. One Nation Tories were driven from the Party. Ambitious pro Europe ministers like Truss and Hunt became unconvincing Brexiteers. Labour finally got rid of Corbyn. Johnson’s personality weaknesses couldn’t survive Covid where he was centre stage. But après Boris there was one heck of a deluge.

Liz Truss was a freak. She worked hard to become Leader and then imploded. It was completely unprecedented. I still find it hard to understand how a politician could reach the highest office and then explode so spectacularly.

Rishi Sunak was a political neophyte and was on a hiding to nothing. He had supported Brexit in the Referendum – a decision which reeked of opportunism. Neither before nor after the vote did he make a credible case for leaving the European Union. He was not, of course, alone in that ! But it did mean he rocketed up the Tory pecking order becoming Chancellor well before he was ready. He wasn’t a disaster so when Johnson was unceremoniously discarded it became him or Truss. Hobson’s choice you might think.

Sunak was in the right place at the right time when the men in white coats came for Truss. A man who less than ten years before had no political record at all was in Number 10. The rest is history. Sunak couldn’t win in 2024 but then no other Conservative leader could have won either. And in Opposition under the bizarre Badenoch the natural Party of Government isn’t even the natural Party of Opposition. Out thought on the flanks not just by the impressive revitalised LibDems but by the successors to what David Cameron called “fruit cakes and loonies and closet racists”

Badenoch’s Tories may be struggling but to be undermined by Farage and Co. is the ultimate humiliation. There is no substance at all to Reform. No policies. No political experience. No gravitas. But they from the pig-headed Right and the LibDems from the thoughtful Centre Left are making life very difficult for the Conservative Party.