The trouble with the Tories is that voters think they’re from another planet

It is hardly unprecedented for rising Tories to fall out with their seniors, and vice versa. Before the war, Anthony Eden’s friends used to complain about the ‘Old Gang’ around Neville Chamberlain. The gangsters retaliated by sneering at the ‘Glamour Boys’. Now some of today’s glamour boys are said to be irritated with the ‘bed-blockers’: older MPs who prefer to serve on when they should be creating vacancies for brilliant youth. There is nothing unusual in any of that — but Tories of an earlier epoch would be bewildered by their successors’ eagerness to inflate every trivial dispute into a headline. Many of today’s Tories insist on approaching every problem with an open mouth.

This has led some commentators to wonder whether bed-blocking might be a graver matter than the Parliamentary tenacity of a handful of knights and dames. Could it be that the real bed-blocker is the Tory party itself? The most recent history of the Tories, by John Ramsden, is entitled An Appetite For Power. The text vindicates the title, describing the way in which each Tory generation responded to power like iron filings to a magnet. In those days, the Tories regarded themselves as the national party, virtually entitled to freehold possession of 10 Downing Street.

That has ceased to be true. Though the Tories still occupy a prime site on the Right of British politics, they no longer seem capable of developing it. Malcontents such as Peter Hitchens would argue that the party has become the Left’s unwitting accessory: too weak to win its way back to government, but strong enough to prevent the emergence of a more effective right-wing challenger.

It is easy to marshal a counter-case. The shrewdest analyst of contemporary public opinion is anything but convinced that the Tories are moribund. If Tony Blair were, he would be less subject to stress.