The Next Margaret Thatcher

Elizabeth Truss, apparently.

Well, quite.

The Conservative Party has been hoovering up Liberals for a very long time: Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals as one of whom Michael Heseltine first sought election to Parliament, 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.

Among those last, the most blatantly obvious outrider or trailblazer is Elizabeth Truss, a veteran anti-monarchist campaigner within that party, and also possessed of most unorthodox opinions regarding the institution of marriage, but whom the Conservative hierarchy forced upon a safe Conservative seat in time for the 2010 General Election, since when it has promoted her vigorously in and through the media.

The followers of David Owen, another who never formally signed up, were in a very similar position, although Owen himself is now close to Ed Miliband. The feud between Heseltine and the former Miss Roberts was fundamentally and ultimately an intra-Liberal affair, and at the time of writing it remains so. Even if vicariously and posthumously, Margaret Thatcher’s father was the last great Liberal commercial magnate from the provinces to exercise national political power in that specific capacity.

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.

But preferably in a context of electoral reform, which can only suit the Tories down to the ground. They are not the only ones.