Cain and Unable

But which is which, and why?

Today, it boggles the mind that John Major was the candidate of the Right in 1990. Likewise, it should boggle the mind that Jon Cruddas, if he manages to get onto the ballot paper at all, will be presented as the candidate of the Left. He will be the only one not to have come up through the campus-based, sectarian Hard Left to whom the only thing worth knowing about the Labour Movement was and is that they hated and hate it. Having not just one, but both, of Ralph Miliband's sons in the race ices this cake too deliciously for words.

On the other side, however, 1990 somehow no longer seems quite that long ago. Once again, there are between 50 and 60 MPs, including around 20 Ministers with half a dozen of them in the Cabinet, who are not really Tories but Liberals, some of them decidedly left-wing Liberals, almost all of them Eurofederalists, and most of them from highly privileged backgrounds. Those MPs are now technically Lib Dems rather than Conservatives. But that, even more than ever, is now a distinction without a difference.

As ordinarily since the Conservative Party created itself by absorbing successive waves of Liberal refugees, there are at least as many of them as there are MPs in any sense on the Right, and considerably more of the former than of the latter in government, with plenty of the former and next to none of the latter around the Cabinet table. It was ever thus. Or, at any rate, it was usually thus. Including whenever the Conservative Party has been in government, with no sort of exception in the 1980s.

Electoral reform is on its way. Let us face its responsibilities. Let us go back to our Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots. Let us make ourselves worthy partners of those who are proud, as we are, to be variously provincial, rural, patriotic, morally and socially conservative, strictly realist in foreign policy, and therefore unwelcome in any of the three dying parties left over from the twentieth century.

“The New Politics”, indeed.