The Empty Tank?

Liz Truss looks as ridiculous on a tank as Margaret Thatcher did. And of course she did, before the Soviet Union simply collapsed as and when it was always going to do, as predicted by the traditional Right across the West from day one, having never posed any military threat to the West, again as explained by the traditional Right from day one.

Yet the Conservative Party has been defined by the takeover of the largely bovine Tory machine by small but hugely influential bands of Liberals. Their success has been so complete that almost all Conservatives now assume that "free" market economics and a foreign policy of military interventionism are "traditional Tory values" that their party has always held. Nothing could be further from the case.

Such is the legacy of the Country Whigs, of the Patriot Whigs, of the Liberal Unionists, of the Liberal Imperialists, of the National Liberals, of Alderman Alfred Roberts's daughter, of the founders and funders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and so on. Next up, Betty Gusset?

Consider that the National Liberal Michael Heseltine privatised more of the British economy than any other Minister ever, that a daughter of Edwardian Liberalism signed the Single European Act as a cornerstone of the same project, and that the Coalition imposed the austerity programme at home while waging war on Libya.

Such is Whiggery and Gladstonianism, which the Conservatives will happily adopt if they think that it can win them elections, or even if they do not. That adoption is their defining story. Even now, the main electoral threat to the Conservatives, insofar as there is one, is the possible defection to the Liberal Democrats of Thatcherite, and therefore Remainer, voters in the South of England, which is one of the most monolithically liberal places on earth.