After 13 wasted years, can this broken party ever be truly Conservative AGAIN?

Tomorrow, the Tories will have been in power longer than New Labour – but there’s depressingly little to show for it. A despairing STEPHEN GLOVER asks...

smear Mr Roberts with antiSemitism, not least because natCon’s leading voice is Jewish. And this from a newspaper which recently carried a grotesque cartoon of former BBC chairman Richard Sharp with tropes that were indubitably anti-Semitic, as the guardian later conceded.

the Left is bound to hate the national Conservatives, no doubt partly because it recognises that some of their ideas could have widespread electoral appeal. But will the tories listen?

Several Conservative MPs have publicly disapproved. One, quoted anonymously in the times and supposedly on the Left of the party, claims that natCon is ‘about transporting extreme Right-wing culture and American division and rhetoric, which we need to reject’. this epitomises the philosophical insularity, smugness and ignorance of some tories.

Such a response is indistinguishable from the guardian’s, and misrepresents what natCon stands for. Here are the tories — adrift, unpopular even with many of their natural supporters, and apparently about to lose an election.

You might think they would show some humility, as well as a smidgeon of common sense, since institutions in crisis, which the tory party undoubtedly is, need to look outwards for help.

if only the Conservative Party since 2010 had had more respect for traditional tory values — which, as i say, natCon is reviving rather than inventing — it wouldn’t have made such a mess of the past 13 years.

granted, David Cameron and george Osborne were hamstrung by their coalition with the Liberal Democrats, so that manifesto pledges such as raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million were abandoned. But these weren’t resuscitated even after the tories won an overall majority in 2015.

Almost the first thing Cameron and Osborne had done was to cut the defence budget by 8 per cent. it was already squeezed as a result of our ill-conceived entanglement in Afghanistan. they were trying to balance the books, but reducing our Armed Forces to the bare bones was profoundly un-tory.

Our Army, navy and Air Force have remained underfunded ever since, so much so that a senior American general not long ago declared that this country is no longer capable of defending itself.

Even now, in the midst of a European war, and with China presenting an ever greater threat, the government is increasing defence spending by only a derisory amount. What’s the point of the tories if they won’t properly defend our country?

they have shown a similar carelessness towards the British people over net immigration. David Cameron repeatedly undertook to bring it down to ‘the tens of thousands’, though in 2015, the year before the EU referendum, it reached 329,000.

this administration has done even worse. next thursday, we are likely to learn that net immigration in the 12 months to December 2022 increased by between 700,000 and one million — an all-time record, and a betrayal of Brexit.

Already overstretched public services are put under immense pressure by uncontrolled immigration, while the housing crisis is exacerbated. And our national culture — the precious, delicate organism cherished by Yoram Hazony — can’t continue to absorb numbers on this scale.

Meanwhile, more than five million adults under the age of 65 are ‘economically inactive’. About half of these are said to be incapacitated by illness (can they all be?), while the rest are reluctant to work. they have been abandoned by the tories.

As the academic Matthew goodwin pointed out during the conference, Britain has some of the highest rates of family breakdown in the Western world, with more than 40 per cent of children no longer living with both their parents when they turn 18. this obviously isn’t all the fault of the Conservatives, but how have they made things better?

the list of tory failures goes on. they cut back the police. Cameron and Osborne sucked up to China, and recklessly encouraged Beijing to invest in British infrastructure. they invaded Libya for no good reason, and then forgot all about it. they have consistently built fewer houses than they promised.

Have there been any achievements in the past 13 years? Michael gove, who spoke at the conference on tuesday, cited improving school academic standards (for which as a former Education Secretary he was largely responsible) and iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit, which has revolutionised social security.

AND then there is Brexit, for which no preparations were made by Cameron and Osborne, and on which this timid government has failed to capitalise. But it lives on as an idea whose time could still come — unless or until Sir Keir Starmer takes over.

governing is difficult, i know that, and it is easy enough to criticise. But who can doubt that these past 13 years have been largely wasted? the tories have been managerial, rather than strategic in their thinking — and they haven’t been much good at managing.

in many ways, the tories’ period in office might as well have never happened. As i shall discuss in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday, we live in a state largely fashioned by new Labour. Unlike successive ineffectual tory administrations, the Blairites and Brownites knew what they wanted to achieve. they left a legacy.

And now, in what may be the dying days of the tories, the national Conservatives come up with some interesting ideas, many of which sound familiar to those of us with long memories.

Might not championing these ideas help revive tory fortunes among voters who feel ignored and marginalised by a government whose preoccupations seem so very far from their concerns?

i believe in miracles, so maybe the tories will astonish us and win next year’s election. More likely, they’ll find themselves in the political wilderness. in either event, i live in hope that this broken party will one day become Conservative again.