What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?

The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive state control or may fail without hope of public rescue. Not everyone will share those values. But I think everyone should accept that it’s proved catastrophic that those values have apparently disappeared from public policy.

History rhymes, but does not repeat itself. The lessons of previous periods when major economic policies of an interventionist sort were agreed with no serious dissent ought to have been learnt. In particular, the disasters of the Heath government, which went as far as reintroducing Wilson’s National Board for Prices and Incomes, should be considered.

At the moment we have a situation where it seems to be almost universally accepted that millions of people perfectly capable of work should be supported in full or in part. The abandonment of social principles that trusted personal responsibility at the outset of the Covid pandemic still seems to me quite remarkable. I wrote a novel about it which began: ‘The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.’ I still find it quite incredible that the state at the time was under the control of the Tories, who were supposed to value personal independence.

The severe lockdown had a number of consequences. The economic burden will be felt for decades. We are just finding out what lockdown turned that generation of children, school and university students into – in many cases, unsocialised, obsessed with victimhood and tiny slights, full of undirected rage.