Tory wets are being used by the Remainer elite

Jeremy Hunt and his supporters are darlings of a metro-liberal class who will never vote Conservative

When I hear someone say “I’d vote Conservative if Rory Stewart were leader,” I know exactly what I’m dealing with. Someone who would never, ever vote for the Conservative Party, even if it were led by Mr Stewart, Ruth Davidson or the Prince of Wales.

With Bojo back in the soup, the Tory Left – aka One Nation Conservatives, an irritating misnomer – spy an opportunity to turn the clock back to when, they think, Tories were considered honourable, pragmatic and progressive. Their preferred candidate is Jeremy Hunt, currently on manoeuvres, and is clearly distressed by what he feels Boris has done to the Tory brand.

The One Nationers are a psychological type. They see themselves as the party of the established order, but our establishment is no longer Tory, dominated as it is, from the NHS to HSBC, by the liberal-left. Hence the One Nationers, elected by Telegraph readers, care deeply about the views of BBC producers, and every time they make a concession to trendy opinion – hike taxes, ban cars, invest in stethoscopes made of gold – they earn a polite round of applause and feel better about being themselves. To be labelled “the good Tory” is (almost) to be absolved of the sin of being a Conservative; the Hunt squad imagine that there is a coalition of sensible, moderate people out there crying out for someone brave enough to mount a radical defence of the status quo.

But I’m sorry to tell you chaps that the people patting your back hate the Conservative Party, and no matter how far it tacks to the Left, will always vote for whatever party out-lefts it. They flatter you because they perceive you to be “in the wrong party”, “weak” or an accidental Trojan horse for their own ideas that will so transform the Conservatives from within that they are no longer Conservative – and even then (I cannot say this often enough), they still won’t give you a vote. They are like the crocodiles in that Bond movie, with Roger Moore stranded on a rock in a swamp, trying to keep the critters at bay by tossing them scraps of meat. Of course they will smile and say thank you, and bribery works for a while. Till you run out of meat.

Hunt is wooing backbenchers with a pledge to scrap the Irish Sea border, which sounds Ukippy, but elite excitement about the possibility of a One Nation “moment” is fuelled by the perception that Hunt, Davidson, Damian Green, Theresa May and co are fundamentally Remainers who will, with the application of some of that old-fashioned Tory practicality, see that Brexit isn’t working and reverse it. That One Nationers can’t see that they are being used is a little sad. Less forgivable is their mangling of history.

One Nationism in the 19th century, as promoted by Benjamin Disraeli, was not liberal. The Liberals were liberal (ie, Gladstone), while Disraeli favoured a Brexit-style populist alliance of working-class and aristocracy to take on middle-class elites. He was a romantic patriot; the man who sold us on the empire. And the person he most closely resembles in modern politics is … well, just listen to Jan Morris’s description of the writer-turned-pm, with his “catchy way with words and notions, his fun, his conceit, his air of worldly scandal”, who “thrust his way into the senior ranks of the Conservative Party by guile and showmanship”. Such a phenomenon is a force beyond party, often loathed by the organisation he uses as a vehicle. The morning after the vote, my mother said to me over breakfast, “Why do you call Boris ‘toast’ in your sketch?”

“Because we now know 148 of his own MPS hate him.”

“But my dear, they’ve always hated him, and always will! His strength is that he doesn’t care.”

♢ There is no national consensus;  there isn’t even a consensus within the Conservative Party. The only way to win is to build a parliamentary majority (NB: not even a majority of the votes) and keep it by rewarding your supporters. Ease their financial burden; stand up for their values. Your enemies will try to eat you, and why should it come as a surprise? All you owe them is a jolly good fight. One leader who understood this was Richard Nixon.

Here’s a coincidence for you: at the height of partygate, I’m scheduled this week to speak on a panel in Parliament to mark the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Nixon was probably ignorant of the burglary but guilty of the cover-up, as revealed in the tapes that he had installed in the White House. When Pat Buchanan, his speechwriter, heard of the existence of the tapes, his advice was simple and sound: burn ’em.

Most people took the lesson of Watergate to be that the presidency needed greater limits, but some conservatives went the other way, arguing America needed a strong executive to counter the other, more liberal institutions, and that media coverage was so biased, the centreright required a media of its own. Fox News was the end result.

Donald Trump’s intellectual admirers compared him not to Trump but to Nixon, for his populism and, yes, his willingness to play tough in a system liberals had hypocritically sewn up for themselves.

“History will treat me fairly,” predicted Tricky Dicky after his downfall. “Historians probably won’t because most historians are on the Left.”