The Tame Blue Yonder

"The party rules! The party rules!" The party rules nothing. If Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, in either order, were already the First and Second Lords of the Treasury, then you could make yourselves ridiculous to your hearts' content by conferring on whoever you pleased the vanity title of Leader of your precious party.

We are living through what will be remembered as a short and weird chapter in British history when a sect from the outer fringe took over the Government and sought to conform this country to the vision of a tiny cabal of the barely British and the not British at all. As enthusiastic criminalisers of peaceful protest, in what way are they "libertarians"?

Tufton Street is full of foreigners, most of whom know so little about Britain that they seem to think that even at her zenith Margaret Thatcher was ever as popular here as she was in the United States, and that in any case she was a kind of English Reagan, which I even have to concede is to do her a disservice.

Or what does, most obviously, Daniel Hannan truly understand of Britain? Brought up between Peru and Marlborough, in the days when public schools really were public schools, ask him about the pop music or the popular television of the period. He discovered some obscure losers of the battle of ideas from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and he now castigates the rest of us for our failure to recognise them as the Soul of the Nation.

Non-military coups, at least, always expect someone or other to rally to them, but that hardly ever happens. Having been staged by figures who had worked in such areas briefly and unsuccessfully, if at all, this putsch had expected the City, the money markets, the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the International Monetary Fund to hang out the bunting and to break into The Hallelujah Chorus.

That that has not happened raises the question of whether those would react so badly to an economically egalitarian and democratising Government. They may not like it, but there is no reason to assume that there would be anything like the events of recent days, which, moreover, have established an absolute taboo, likely to last at least 30 years, against any cut either in the top rate of income tax from 45p in the pound, or in corporation tax from what will soon be its level.

If you think that the City, the money markets, the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the International Monetary Fund ought not to have this kind of power, then welcome to the club, although we longstanding members have not forgotten how you licked your lips at what you thought was the racing certainty that they were going to bring down Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, or even Ed Miliband and, of all people, Ed Balls.

As for a breakaway party, the Conservatives have the most tribal core vote in the democratic world, and they know it. Across most of England, much of Wales, and far more of Scotland than is usually admitted, there is a Tory Deep Society of avowedly "non-political" organisations and social circles of which can be, and is, said everything from "Nothing round here would happen without them" to "Everything round here is stitched up by them".

Some of those people may vote for, and indeed be, Independent councillors, at least in the absence of an official Conservative candidate. A lot of them voted first for UKIP and then for the Brexit Party at European elections, although they were not the only people who did. A smaller number may, at a push, be persuaded under certain circumstances to vote Liberal Democrat at a parliamentary by-election.

But the majority of them would not even fall into any of those categories, and when it came to a General Election, then there would simply be nothing to discuss. The question would not arise. This is not about policy. This is not about ideology. This is about identity. And the Conservative Party knows it.