Spectator's Notes | 23 March 2016

Why have David Cameron and George Osborne overreached? Why are so many in their own party no longer disposed to obey them? Obviously the great issue of Europe has something to do with it. But there is another factor. Victory at the last election, followed by the choice of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, has convinced too many Tories, including Mr Osborne himself, that they will be in power for ten more years at least. So they get careless and cocky. Then they make mistakes. Then they come up against the most admirable fact about parliamentary democracy, which is that you can never guarantee being in power for ten years. (You can’t even guarantee it for the prescribed five, though the iniquitous Fixed-term Parliament Act of the coalition has made this easier than before.) Once this is recognised, the patronage power of Mr Osborne starts to trickle away. Our first Prime Minister, Walpole, is supposed to have defined gratitude as ‘a lively sense of future favours’. Mr Osborne understands this sense well, and has worked hard to awaken it to advance his leadership bid. But what if people start believing that these favours may never be conferred on them? There isn’t much left.

Mr Duncan Smith’s resignation is a marvellous opportunity to reopen old European enmities. It is the small things that hurt. On Sunday, Sir John Major, just wheeled on by the ‘remain’ campaign for a major intervention, was to go on the Andrew Marr Show to talk about his article in that morning’s Sunday Telegraph. Imagine the fury of the former prime minister when he was bumped off by the former backbench rebel against him, IDS.