Dismembering

Fresh from the news that it makes more from bequests than it does from membership fees, more from the dead than from the living, the Conservative Party turns out today to have fewer members than the SNP has.

And even Labour's figure of 540,000 is misleadingly low. You have to opt in to pay the trade union political levy, indeed that has been the case since the Thatcher years, so the real Labour figure is 860,000 voluntary due-payers of one kind or another. 

Whereas, based on the Conservative Party's income from membership subscriptions, its official figure of 124,000 is impossible unless 90 per cent of its members are aged 21 or younger. The true figure is no higher than 50,000. 

Of course, the world's leading political vehicle for Wall Street liberalism will never go bust no matter how few people there are in it. But that is what it is. 

It is the billionaire-subsidised party for the attendees at John McCain's funeral and for those in Britain who wish that they were the Obamas, the Bushes and the Clintons.