The Tories’ only hope against Labour propaganda is to act as the ‘grown-ups’

The feuding Conservatives have to come together for the greater good to counter a triumphal hard Left exploiting their discord

It takes a particular kind of personality to make instant political capital out of human tragedy. With the fire still raging at Grenfell Tower, and before anyone could possibly know what had caused it, let alone attribute blame, Jeremy Corbyn announced that it was a consequence of council spending cuts. Later, Labour seems to have amended this to fire service cuts.

The Conservatives must take this as a warning of what they are up against. As they enter into talks with the EU which are rightly described as the country’s most important negotiations in living memory, the nature of the official and unofficial opposition they face is going to be critical to all of our futures.

When David Davis meets Michel Barnier tomorrow, it will be under the most difficult conditions imaginable: facing him at home is the most irresponsible opposition in recent British history, and at his back is a scheming pack of Tory dissidents openly briefing against him.

On balance, the internal party foes are more of a threat to the project in which he is about to engage, partly because they can have a direct effect on its proceedings, but also because they will destabilise the Conservatives in a fundamental way.

At precisely the moment when the Tories should be uniting against an extremely dangerous alternative government, and offering the picture of that unity as a model for a postBrexit Britain, they are threatening to fall into hopeless factional dissension. With a hideous irony, the tower block disaster forestalled what was forecast to be the first open declaration of this internecine war: Chancellor Philip Hammond was to have used the cancelled Mansion House speech to set out the Remainer (sorry, the Soft Brexit) case against Theresa May’s stated plan to leave both the single market and the customs union.

We were, for terrible reasons, spared that last week – but it promises to return with all guns blazing as soon as it is seemly. There was an ominous trail of the full event last Friday when Mr Hammond issued a gnomic statement to the effect that, in the coming talks, the UK “should prioritise protecting jobs, protecting economic growth and protecting prosperity”.

So who was he suggesting would not wish to “prioritise” these good things? Those insisting on what has become known as Hard Brexit? And what are they up to exactly?

Deliberately putting “jobs, economic growth and prosperity” in danger for the sake of their dogmatic principle? Here we go again. The talks are not yet begun and we have a Tory fight over Europe. This is insane – and at this historical point, terrifyingly, stupidly reckless.

To understand what is being put at risk, look at the official enemy who will make hay of all this discord: when I say that the Corbyn statements about the effect of spending cuts on the tower block disaster required a special kind of mentality, I do not mean this purely as condemnation. Of course they were utterly tasteless and certainly they demonstrated the ruthless exploitation of any and all events for ideological advantage that characterises the tactics of the hard Left. But what they also indicate is a dedication that springs from fanatical moral certainty.

The Left-wing propaganda machine – which is indefatigable – rests on the assumption that revolution requires, above all, the alteration of public consciousness. Getting in first with planted ideas, injecting skewed perceptions into the debate, even telling outright lies (which will be forgotten in the medium and long term) are all accepted techniques because they promote the ultimate good of a socialist society.

This strategy is inculcated explicitly in all serious recruits until it becomes a reflex response to public incidents. It can only be confronted with a systematic, tireless exposure of its means and objectives. You have to get up very early in the morning and go to bed very late at night to win at this game. For the sort of people who are inclined to support the Conservatives – or any centre Right party – that does not come naturally.

Their only realistic hope is to develop a different approach: to be the “grown-ups in the room” who know what matters to other grown-ups whose lives are filled with something more than political activism and who do, in fact, always constitute the great majority of the population. But if the current threats of internal dissension are fulfilled, the Tories are going to look more like feuding siblings who cannot even agree on a common position between themselves, let alone achieve one with a relentlessly hostile negotiating adversary.

I confess that in making some of the observations recorded in this column, I betray myself as a partisan of one side in the dispute that I wish to suppress. Yes, reader, I am inclined to support Hard Brexit (or, as many of us prefer, Clean Brexit.) Staying in the customs union would mean sacrificing the freedom to reach separate trade deals with countries outside the EU, and it is that possibility which has always seemed to me the most valuable advantage of leaving the European protectionist club.

In truth, it is that prospect that is most likely to be conducive to future “jobs, economic growth and prosperity”. But forget all that for now. There is a much more urgent imperative and that is to hold this show together so that a political programme which would certainly be destructive of those three precious elements can be effectively discredited.

The grown-ups are going to have to come together for the sake of the greater good and reconcile themselves to what will almost certainly be the transitional, compromised outcome of those talks that begin tomorrow.

This will be, of course, a terrible waste of an opportunity. Theresa May once had a decent chance of looking like the plausible adult in the room with her seriousness of purpose and lack of extrovert excess.

I doubt very much that this option is credible any longer. For whatever reason, she has failed to display the emotional depth and the judgment that are the basic qualifications for confident “grown-up-ness”.

You cannot play the effective headmistress if you run away when the school assembly gets rowdy. But she, as was made repeatedly clear during the election campaign, is not the Conservative Party. Perhaps more by necessity than deliberation, she has ended up with a Cabinet that encompasses some exceptionally articulate communicators from both camps of the EU argument: Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Mr Davis himself on the one hand, Damian Green and the hyper-active Mr Hammond on the other.

All of them should be aware of the menacing force that is waiting for its moment if a fatal split renders the Conservatives incapable of governing. John McDonnell is calling his army of trade unionists onto the streets to demand that Theresa May be removed from office – even though she won a majority of seats and a majority of votes. Brownite moderate Tom Watson has been sacked as party chairman and replaced by Ian Lavery, a former president of the National Union of Mineworkers.

The veteran Blairites are offering themselves ignominiously for front bench jobs – and being refused. This is the real thing, boys and girls: the authoritarian, triumphal hard Left within sight of government.

It cannot be beyond the wits and the rationality of those effective senior Cabinet members to find a form of words – a simulacrum of reasoned agreement – to get through this without yet another suicidal bloodletting.

The electorate would have no time for a party whose hold on government is already tenuous, tearing each others’ eyes out in a self-indulgent fight over a hypothetical outcome which will almost certainly prove to be transitory. Put a sock in it.