The Tories once had a radical fringe. Now it is the whole party | Aditya Chakrabortty |... - 0 views
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hey have shrunk into being the party of southern England. And even there, the hold is slipping. This January, a senior government minister told the Sun of a new rule, coined while out canvassing, that “If you knock on a door and they have books on their shelves, you can be pretty sure these days they’re not voting Tory.
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Voting Tory is for one’s dotage, as health secretary Matt Hancock remarked this week, voting Tory is now “something people start to do when they get their winter fuel allowance”
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May’s would-be replacements know that to stand a chance, they must sound as extreme as possible. Liz Truss was a remainer; now she garbles speeches about the supermarkets’ unpatriotic dearth of British cheese. Fellow former remainer Jeremy Hunt warned only last summer that leaving Europe without a deal would be “a mistake that we would regret for generations”;; today he jabs at Brussels like a mini-Francois
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A three-time Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, defined his party’s purpose as “hostility to radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility … The fear that radicalism may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for its own existence”
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his party has today been hijacked by the radicals. It no longer has space for the Keynesianism of Rab Butler or the liberalism of Francis Pym. It is the home of the radical right. That defines the Brexit project; it is also the dying embers of Thatcherism.