A glittering display of Tory ineptitude, extremism, grandstanding and disloyalty

It is now widely understood that Cameron’s political office is inadequate to the task. Party leaders don’t have to be liked by their MPs, but they do have to be good at politics. The advice of one minister to the Prime Minister this week – ‘you’ve got to start smiling at the fuckers and pretend you like them’ – is not quite enough.Tough, decisive action will win respect. Cocking it up won’t. This week Cameron cocked it up. His political machine possesses neither guile nor muscle. A clever leader knows he needs both. He’s surrounded by trendy media types and OEs, when he needs a few street fighters and strong-armers. Their miscalculation over this meaningless debate, which could have been utterly side-lined, meant that it was elevated, partly at least, into a referendum on his leadership.

There’s a gathering storm of protest on the Conservative backbenches: MPs from pre-2010 intakes who feel overlooked, right-wingers who despise every minute of compromise with the Lib Dems, and anti-Europeans who fear Cameron is more Heath than Thatcher. Half the parliamentary party comprises the 2010 intake, all fresh-faced and mustard-keen. That means half the party does not. These are the veterans of the cones hot-lines, the baseball hats, and the Quiet Man. They suffered the fiasco of John Major, the humiliation of three landslide defeats, and the indignity of watching Lib Dems taking up red boxes, only to see the likes of 29-year Chloe Smith land a ministerial post. Smith, famously a management consultant and not an accountant, is not 2010 intake, but having entered parliament in July 2009 she may as well be. To the bitter, jealous, grizzled Tory veterans on the backbenches her happy smile and perfect skin represent the death of their ambition and gravestone of their careers.

Cameron’s government now has three blocs. He has his own supporters drawn from the instinctively loyal, the craven careerists, and a tiny number who actually believe in a centrist, mainstream Conservative Party. There’s the Liberal Democrats (at least the ones who support the Coalition, or are ministers). And there is now clearly a new bloc – the Continuity Conservative Party, prepared to vote against the Government whip on Europe, regardless of the consequences to their own, or their party’s standing.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Conservative horror show that was ‘Back to Basics’. Back to Basics was the Conservative Party being slowly and painfully branded as hypocrites: a campaign for public morality masking private immorality. The toxification of the Tories intensified during these five years of sexual and financial scandal.

But what sounded the real death-knell for the Tories after 1992 were not the brown envelopes stuffed with tenners, but their fatal splits over Europe. ‘Euro-sceptic’, let us never forget, is a euphemism. Many Conservative MPs are not at all ‘sceptical’ about the EU; they loathe it and all its works. This is as true of the current crop as it was under John Major. From Margaret Thatcher’s defenestration in November 1990, through to John Major’s negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991, the second reading of the Maastricht Bill in May 1992, Britain’s ejection from the ERM in September 1992, the launch of the ‘Fresh Start’ group of Euro-rebels in September 1992, the Tories Conference in Brighton in October 1992, John Major’s description of three Euro-sceptics in his Cabinet as ‘bastards’ in July 1993, and John Redwood’s leadership bid in July 1995, the Conservative Party was riven apart by Europe.

I have a little book by Teresa Gorman called ‘The Bastards’ which she improbably inscribed to me ‘with good wishes’. I was her Labour opponent in Billericay at the 1997 general election, when after five years of her serial rebellions over Europe, she saw her majority slump from 23,000 to 1,800 on an 18 per cent swing. The ‘bastards’ thought they spoke for England. They spoke instead on behalf of an anachronistic nationalism, out of tune with modern Britain.

John Major’s spokesperson Tim Collins, later a Tory MP, described Redwood’s supporters, mostly drawn from the ranks of Maastricht rebels, as ‘a swivel-eyed barmy army from Ward 8 at Broadmoor.’ Broadmoor is a high-security mental institution, with alumni including Charles Bronson, Ronnie Kray and the Yorkshire Ripper. For the Prime Minister’s spokesperson to liken Conservative backbenchers to the criminally-insane is perhaps a signal that all was not harmonious in this period.

In the contest for party leader, John Redwood, standing on a staunchly anti-EU manifesto, won 89 votes in the first ballot of Tory MPs. Eighty-nine Tory MPs willing to get rid of an election-winning Prime Minister and replace him with a Vulcan, with a crazy manifesto, is a staggeringly high number. It was a sure sign of a party in disarray, which had lost faith in its own leadership, and given up any desire to represent the public.

It is slightly higher number, but smaller percentage, than the 81 Tories who voted against the Government on Tuesday.