Gold, Frankenstein and Myrrh

I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist it.

What does Mark Pritchard imagine that the Conservative Party, as an organisation, is or has ever been? It is a device for ensuring that Tories in the country must vote, or at least feel that they must vote, for candidates who are really Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts's daughter and her devotees, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs, followers of David Owen (one of whom was still sitting as a Conservative MP until his retirement in 2010), and now Lib Dems. It is, frankly, inconceivable that Conservative candidates will be stood against sitting MPs seeking re-election after five years as Ministers in a peacetime Government led by the Leader of the Conservative Party.

Hatred of the State is an extreme Liberal, and not in any sense a Tory, position. It has issued in the antipolitics of the parliamentary expenses "scandal": not a penny was ever paid out either for the moat or for the duck house, none of this had anything to do with policy, and so on. And it has more lately issued in flagrant contempt of Parliament, technically so called. Yet the newspaper in question in both of those cases would regard itself as the voice of Toryism. It no longer is. Any more than the Conservative Party, as such, ever has been.