If the Tories do not pull themselves together very soon the party will have forfeited its case for re-election
What, and for whom, does today's – and tomorrow's – Conservative party stand? In various periods in the past, it has been possible to answer that question with some clarity. Before 1832, the party stood for the landed interest. After 1867, it added the flag, the union and the shopkeeper too. In the first half of the 20th century, the Tories were for empire and against socialism. After 1945, they began an historic compromise with social democracy. After 1979 this was turned on its head, in a break with the one-nation past. Yet, throughout much of its history and most of these twists and turns, the party has embodied the Prince of Salina's dictum in Lampedusa's novel The Leopard– that things must change in order that things remain the same. But today?
There was a time when David Cameron promised a serious return to the pragmatic tradition. The years have exposed, sadly in many ways, the shallowness of his modernisation project. He embraced progressive and open social principles while leaving much of the narrow old thinking, which had taken the party to three crushing defeats since 1997, untouched. The Tory party that has turned in on itself again over Europe, and now over the issue of gay marriage, a principled happiness-creating reform that is now widely supported, reflects Mr Cameron's wider failure. It is a party that is pulling against itself, unsure where its conservatism and its electoral self-interest lie, forgetting that its principal task in the voters' eyes is to govern the country well.
The enduring narrowness and division are partly Mr Cameron's doing. But they are in large part Lady Thatcher's poisonous and still not properly recognised legacy. All this is reflected both in the leadership's reported taunts against the party's "swivel-eyed loons" and in the grassroots unhappiness over Mr Cameron's handling of the EU referendum issue, as well as in yesterday's backward-looking divisions and contortions over gay rights.
All modern political parties face the danger that they can cease to look, feel and talk like the country they seek to govern. The Tories face this problem in a particularly dramatic way. Their membership is either disproportionately elderly, disproportionately obsessive about one or two issues, or both. As a result, they constantly risk appearing – and being – out of touch with the world that is inhabited by those whose support they need for re-election. The history of the past 20 years ought to have taught the Tories, in particular, that they have to listen to the electorate, not just the people who share their prejudices, if they are to broaden their appeal and win elections. Mr Cameron came close, but he is now slipping back into the past. As Lord Ashcroft, who is nothing if not a true Tory, said on Monday, the party urgently needs to move beyond Europe and even beyond claiming to be clearing up their predecessors' mess.
Three years ago, and with the Labour government increasingly discredited, the case for a new government in this country was a plausible one. The voters agreed, and chose the Conservatives to provide that new start, but not with full-hearted confidence, hence the coalition government. The voters' hesitation has been richly vindicated. In the past few months, the Tories have turned increasingly inward and obsessive. They have been weakly led by Mr Cameron. They appear far more interested in the threat from Ukip to their party than in the issues that face the country.
But they get the response fundamentally wrong, even to that. The appeal of Ukip is not confined to either Europe or opposition to gay marriage. It is about rejecting all the existing parties in difficult times. That is why the Tory reflex to make stands that expose their divisions may actually boost Ukip rather than deflate it. The events of the past 24 hours over gay marriage are a case in point. They are a warning of what Lord Ashcroft calls a spiral of irrelevance. He is right about that danger. If the Tory party does not pull itself together very soon it will have forfeited any case it might still have had for re-election.