Bred In The Bone

Peter Bone and his audience of Lib Dem delegates both thoroughly enjoyed his winding up act on Newsnight.

But while they all applauded when he accused their party of having significantly watered down the (still horrendous) proposals for the NHS, there was complete silence when, in the previous breath, he accused their party of having blocked the repatriation of powers from the EU. Everyone knows that David Cameron no more wanted that than Nick Clegg did, and that he would never have attempted it even if he had had a majority of two hundred.

Might Lib Dem activists be following the remnant Liberal Party and the remnant SDP in waking up to the reality of a legislative body which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report, of the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, and of subjugation to the legislative will of of Stalinists and Trotskyists, neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany, Dutch ultra-Calvinists who refuse to have women as candidates, and people who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland?

Such concerns, along with a Keynesian opposition to what have always been the EU's economic agenda, have always been articulated at every level of the Labour Party, where they are very much re-emerging to the fore at the moment. Not for nothing did three times as many Labour as Conservative MPs vote against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so, while John Prescott and David Blunkett had abstained rather than support it at a meeting of Labour's National Executive Committee.

When the Conservative Whip was withdrawn from a mere eight MPs, joined by another who resigned it in sympathy, for abstaining on the European Finance Bill, 44 Labour MPs voted against it. Then as on Maastricht, the Labour three-line whip was to abstain. Then as on Masstricht, not a single Labour MP rebelled by voting in favour. One of Labour's anti-Maastricht contingent, Peter Hain, went on to be Minister for Europe even under Tony Blair, and is now writing Ed Miliband's plan for party reorganisation.

Peter Hain, late of the Young Liberals. Nick Harvey, now a Lib Dem Defence Minister, also voted against Maastricht. Simon Hughes, now Lib Dem Deputy Leader, abstained. Even on the essentially meaningless proposal for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the Lib Dem rebels in favour included David Heath, now Deputy Leader of the House, Alistair Carmichael, now Chief Whip, and Tim Farron, now Party President.

Whereas all the concentration is on the brayers about "wegulation fwom Bwussels", the worshippers of the Prime Minister who signed the Single European Act, the people whom Fleet Street and the BBC remember as the least intelligent members of their own public school forms. We are now being told that there are around 120 of them. Where? Who? There is a world elsewhere, you know.

However, Peter Bone was right that Lib Dem MPs are now going around saying that they are going to stand as joint Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates, and the ever-deferential local Conservative Associations are just going to be told by David Cameron to like it or lump it. It was always inconceivable that Conservative candidates would have been put up against Lib Dem Ministers, or indeed Lib Dem candidates against Conservative Ministers, who, like the born again "Conservative and National Liberal" candidates such as Randolph Churchill, will also be expected to present themselves as joint nominees.

"Conservative and Liberal Democrat" recalls "Conservative and National Liberal", and before that "Conservative and Liberal Unionist". The Conservative Party has been hoovering up Liberals for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts's daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs (although its founders and its founding backer, like Roberts, never actually joined), and now the Liberal Democrats. The followers of David Owen, another who has never formally signed up and who is in fact close to Ed Miliband, were in a very similar position.

The Conservative Party is itself therefore two parties in one, which would be entirely separate in many other countries, competing hardly at all for the same votes and co-operating hardly at all on any issue of policy. The metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew party has finally defeated and banished the provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business party. The Whigs have finally defeated and banished the Tories, just as they have finally defeated and banished the Radicals. This side of electoral reform, anyway.