Major News

There is nothing remarkable about the fact that Margaret Thatcher took Britain into the ERM. She also gave this country the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Children Act, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, and so much else besides.

Nor is it odd for a Conservative former Prime Minister to question the wisdom of "renewing" Trident. Grave doubts about, or outright hostility towards, nuclear weapons was the position of Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones, George Jellicoe and, above all, Enoch Powell, as well as of figures farther afield such as Dwight D Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and John G Diefenbaker.

However, there is a real story here: undoubtedly acting as an outrider for David Cameron, Sir John Major has joined Francis Maude in saying what we all knew, that the Coalition wants the Coalition to continue even if the Conservative Party manages an overall majority in 2010 (fat chance, but that is not the present point). In so doing, he has made the case for electoral reform.

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, were in a very similar position; the last of those did not retire from the House of Commons until 2010, having sat as Conservative MP since 1987.

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 in a context of electoral reform, which can only suit the Tories down to the ground.

They are not the only ones.