The Tories have only themselves to blame

I was amused the other week to read George Osborne’s Diary in this magazine. In it the man now in charge of giving away the British Museum’s collection recalled something John Major said to him in 1997. This was that the Conservative party ‘will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party’. It is news that the Conservative party ever was.

Really this was a warning from Osborne that the centre-left tendencies of the Conservative party must be adhered to. Though it should be noted that there is a flaw at the source: citing John Major on electoral advice is like quoting a bankrupt on financial planning. Major’s period in office was so calamitous that one of his main policies – pushing through the Maastricht Bill – not only divided his party but caused a wound that was only partly cauterised by a national plebiscite more than two decades later.

Expect these warnings from the losing branch of the Conservative party for the foreseeable. They will come from people who think that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s terms in office were not as popular as they could have been because they weren’t green enough and did not push hard enough to make the country’s energy bills unaffordable. The headlines are already being written: ‘The battle for the soul of the Conservative party.’ That sort of thing. Except this time there is a person who handily fulfils the role of Mephistopheles in the drama.

Nigel Farage’s Reform party was, like the Brexit party and Ukip before that, a completely unforced error on the British right. There was no reason why the Conservative party had to swing so pro-EU after Margaret Thatcher’s time in office, and no reason why the people who turned out to be on the side of the general public’s feeling had to be dismissed as headbangers and closet racists.