The Joy of Six 1525

"Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. 'They are careless of the strife they cause,' he said. 'They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.'" Ian Dunt says John Major is a better former prime minister than Tony Blair will ever be.

Hannah Fearn argues that there is no sudden epidemic of laziness: "What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work."

Stefan Collini examines the roots of Britain's higher education crisis: "The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called 'producers' cartel' that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices."

"But when it comes to AI chatbots, the doctors have learned to proceed with caution. People may tolerate the idea of talking to a computer when booking a holiday or motor insurance but discussing something as personal as your health is quite a different matter." Rory Cellan-Jones on one GP surgery's mixed experience of introducing AI.

Gill Pain discusses what made Agatha Christie so successful: "There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them."

"In order to attract puffins to the island, they created 100, lifelike weather resistant decoy puffins and anchored them to the cliffs. To make the illusion as convincing as possible, the team also installed solar powered speakers to blast continuous puffin calls out to sea to catch the attention of passing juveniles." Eva Cahill reports an ingenious attempt to attract puffins back to an islet off the Isle of Man where they once thrived.

The myth that Labour's tax policies lost them the 1992 election

Why did John Major win the 1992 election when most pundits expected Neil Kinnock's Labour Party to be the victors?

Immediately after the contest, a consensus developed that the reason was the effectiveness of the Conservatives' campaign against Labour's economic policies. This view was certainly advanced by the Tories themselves, as its acceptance would make Labour more timid about challenging Thatcherite economics in future. 

And it was advanced by the head of the Tory campaign, Chris Patten, perhaps as a way of burnishing his reputation and consoling himself after he lost his own seat of Bath to the Liberal Democrats.

But I have always doubted this explanation. I remember thinking that it did not chime with what I had heard during the campaign from voters or from colleagues at work.

I recently came across an article that suggests I was right to be sceptical. In May 1994 the Independent published an article by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice on the findings of their study of the 1992 election.

They go through the various explanations that had been offered for Labour's defeat and find them all wanting – notably the claim that "It's The Sun Wot Won It" made by, you guessed it, The Sun itself.

Here are Heath et al. on the suggestion that it was Labour's tax policies that had been decisive:

Labour's proposals for taxation and national insurance contributions – outlined in John Smith's 'alternative Budget' – were relentlessly attacked by the Conservatives. Faced with the prospect of a cut in their disposable income, the argument runs, voters had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting Labour in.

But our surveys find little evidence to back this argument. It arose because the polls showed a small Labour lead throughout a campaign in which taxation was one of the dominant issues and yet the Tories won. Our research, however, confirms that the pollsters had it wrong all along: they consistently underestimated the Tory vote. The Conservatives were ahead throughout the campaign. 

There was a late swing, but far too small to account for Labour's defeat. And the people who deserted Labour were not particularly averse to high taxation; rather, they seemed to have relatively little faith in Labour's ability to improve services such as health and education.

In fact, the authors find nothing in the 1992 election campaign had much of an effect on the final outcome.

I did receive intimations that there had been a late swing to the Tories. During the campaign, I'd heard stories of Liberal Democrat workers putting money on Nick Harvey gaining North Devon with a large majority, when ultimately he gained it with a small one. 

And I was told to put money on the Lib Dems in Falmouth and Camborne, because Sebastian Coe was going down very badly there. Luckily I didn't, because Coe held the seat for the Tories. He lost to Labour in 1997 and the Lib Dems finally took it in 2005.

My own theory was that voters had chosen John Major over Neil Kinnock. After Margaret Thatcher's late Sturm und Drang years, Major was a breath of fresh air. Those who only know of him as a figure of fun may be surprised at this, but if they study his statesmanlike conduct since losing power they may see why people found him attractive in 1992.

Neil Kinnock, by contrast, had been leader of the opposition for nine years. Some of the attacks on him as a "Welsh windbag" bordered on the racist, but, boy, he did talk a lot. And, burdened by cares of leadership, he had lost the wit and sparkle that had made his name as a backbench MP – notably on Jimmy Young's Radio 2 programme.

So that's why I didn't believe in 1992 that the Tories' attacks on Labour's tax policies had won them the election. And, going by Heath et al.'s study, I was right not to believe what became the received wisdom on that contest.

This question is not just of historical interest. Rachel Reeves's pledge not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT, which has backed her into such a corner, was made because of a more or less conscious memory of 1992.

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher by Mark Garnett

Downing Street Downfalls: The Misadventures of Britain’s Prime Minister Since Thatcher

Mark Garnett

Agenda, 2025, £20

It’s not a novelty for British prime ministers to leave No. 10 without having lost an election: Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Wilson all did so. What is new, says Mark Garnett, is for them to be bundled out of power when they are still in good health.

He dates this trend to the fall of Thatcher in 1990, and it’s tempting to put its acceleration in the years since then down to Brexit. As Garnett says:

The 2016 referendum, and its consequences, accounted directly for Cameron and May; and while Johnson and Truss found means of self-sabotage, arguably neither would have earned the chance to showcase their ineptitude for leadership without Brexit.

But he sees other forces at work. The social upheavals of the Sixties led to a decline in class consciousness and in strong identification with a particular party among voters. In this new world, the popularity and perceived strengths of party leaders became increasingly important, as seen from the fact that Margaret Thatcher is the last party leader to have won an election while being less popular than her main opponent. 

This trend has encouraged a presidential style among prime ministers – a style that the public and press seem to have come to expect. When John Major tried to undo some of the changes of Thatcher’s Boadicea years and restore the importance of the cabinet, it was widely seen as a sign of weakness.

It’s no wonder, then, that politicians, journalists and voters alike now look to a change in prime minister to improve things when a government is in the doldrums. Keir Starmer had better watch out.

Garnett writes with wit and an eye for a good anecdote. David Cameron’s courtship of the Liberal Democrats after the 2010 election "made Casanova sound like a tongue-tied ingénue". At her post-election party conference, Theresa May received "the kind of sympathetic audience response that, in bygone days, had greeted the arrival of the condemned at Tyburn Tree". The claim that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crashed the economy was inaccurate, "but it was certainly not from want of trying".

Downing Street Downfalls is an agreeable companion to contemporary political history and, when it turns to the last ten years, a reminder that there’s nothing quite as strange as the recent past.

This review appears in issue 432 of Liberator magazine.

The Kinks: Autumn Almanac

Time to get his posted before autumn turns to winter. Autumn Almanac is a non-album single from 1967 that made no. 3 in the UK singles chart.

Ray Davies once explained its genesis:

The words were inspired by Charlie, my dad’s old drinking mate, who cleaned up my garden for me, sweeping up the leaves. I wrote it in early autumn, yeah, as the leaves were turning colour.

And Andy Partridge of XTC has commented:

It’s a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it, and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there’s nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts.

Thanks to PowerPop for these quotes.

The character sketches you get in British songs of the later Sixties hark back to the traditions of music hall, and those songs, in turn, influenced the Britpop bands of the mid Nineties.

So maybe it was appropriate that Britpop took place during the premiership of John Major, the son of two music hall artists, and not that of Tony "Young Country" Blair.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles

Lord Bonkers mentioned the other day that my rent falls due on Lady Day. I took this as a subtle reminder that it's a long time since I looked to see what the old brute was saying 30 years ago.

So here's an entry from his diary in Liberator 227 (March 1995), when John Major was fighting the bastards of Euroscepticism - he now seems a giant in comparison to the Tory leaders who were to come after him:

The Palace of Westminster is not a happy place at present. One can hardly enter the gentlemen's lavatory without seeing a gang of Europhobes forcing some poor moderate Conservative's head down the pan and pulling the chain, and this morning I watched Sir Edward Heath being hunted through the lobbies by a full pack of beagles. 

The problem, I would argue, lies in a lack of leadership at the very top of the Conservative Party. This little grey chap they have nowadays may be very good when it comes to traffic cones and motorway service stations, but he is not the sort one would readily follow into battle. It is all too reminiscent of Woolacombe in 1968, when Jeremy Thorpe had to be rescued after he was pushed through a trap door and imprisoned under the stage by the Young Liberals.

I also enjoyed a detail from his visit to Wales, where he passes and enjoyable evening at a village whose name, he is informed, is best translated as: 

The Church of St Mary in the hollow by the pool where Lloyd George seduced Bronwyn - you know, the big girl who used to work in the Co-op.

It doesn't go back quite this far, but there's a free archive of back numbers of Liberator on the magazine's website.

John Major: The last Conservative statesman

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John Major was a figure of fun to many while he was prime minister, but compared to any leader the Conservative Party has come up with since, he is a titan.

Here he is talking about J.D. Vance's speech on the World at One earlier today:

That is not what we expect from the foremost nation in the free world. It’s certainly not statesmanship, and it potentially gives off very dangerous signals.

It’s extremely odd to lecture Europe on the subject of free speech and democracy at the same time as they’re cuddling Mr. Putin.

In Mr. Putin’s Russia, people who disagree with him disappear or die or flee the country, or, on the statistically unlikely level, fall out of high windows somewhere in Moscow.

You can listen to the whole thing on BBC Sounds - Major's interview begins at 12:20.

One interesting point Major makes is that his own father was brought up in the United States.

The strange ride of Alan Amos

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Augustus Carp, our Defections, Principles and Opportunism Correspondent, has drawn my attention to the remarkable career of Alan Amos. What follows comes from research by Mr Carp, backed up by investigations of my own Wikipedia.

Amos was first heard of as a Conservative councillor in Enfield, sitting between 1978 and 1987. He unsuccessfully fought Walthamstow at the 1983 general election, but had more joy four years later, when he was elected for Hexham in far-off in Northumberland.

He was to become a victim of John Major's Back to Basics campaign, or rather of a briefing given to the press by the now-forgotten figure of Tim Collins - he was the Tory MP Tim Farron defeated to gain Westmorland and Lonsdale in 2005.

As far as Major was concerned, Back to Basics was about bringing back the three Rs in school and the timely repairing of pot holes. But when asked by journalists if it was also about private morality, Collins said yes.

The result was the appearance of a never-ending stream of scandals (or minor incidents dressed up to look like scandals) involving Tory MPs. And Amos was involved in one of them, having the misfortune to be arrested for what sounds like cottaging on Hampstead Heath just before the 1992 election. 

Amos was not charged, but he accepted a police caution for indecency, and stood down as MP for Hexham. Perhaps this might have been survivable by the Nineties, but in the climate engendered by Back to Basics he was toast.

While at Westminster, Amos was known for his vehement opposition to abortion and his enthusiasm for corporal punishment. So it was a great surprise when, in 1994, he announced he had joined the Labour Party. In 2000 he was the star of a Guardian article about the former right-wingers who were now approved Labour parliamentary candidates.

And he was given a seat to fight, losing to Peter Lilley in Hitchin and Harpenden in 2001. He was elected as a Labour member for the Millwall ward of Tower Hamlets in 2002, but lost four years later as the yuppies invaded the Isle of Dogs. In 2008 Amos was elected to Worcester City Council.

In May 2014, with the Council hung, he resigned from the Labour Group to become an Independent, allegedly because Labour hadn't put him up for Mayor.  At the Council AGM in June, Amos accepted the Conservative nomination for Mayor, and as Mayor he then voted for council control to change from Labour to Conservative.

A year later, hours before his tenure as Mayor came to an end, Amos announced he was rejoining the Conservative Party. In May 2024 he was to find himself returned as the last remaining Tory on Worcester City Council.

And, a few days ago, Amos resigned from the Tories to become an Independent once again.

So, over the years, Amos has gone from Conservative to Labour to Independent to Conservative to Independent. What comes next? Will he perhaps rediscover his enthusiasm for reactionary social policies and join Reform?

Party like it's 2005: Ed Davey announces new decapitation strategy

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Liberal Democrat leader targets senior Tory seats at UK general election

runs the headline on the Financial Times interview with Ed Davey today.

Older Lib Dems will immediately be put in mind of the 2005 general election, when the party boasted of its 'decapitation strategy'. The seats held by a number of leading Conservatives had been chosen as targets and we expected to deal a mortal blow to the Her Majesty's Opposition on the night.

In the event, David Davis, Oliver Letwin, Theresa May and the rest survived. It was our Labour targets (Cambridge, Hornsey and Wood Green, Manchester Withington) that fell to us at that election.

Our only leading Tory scalp in 2005 was a long-forgotten figure called Tim Collins. It was he who had briefed the press back in 1993 that John Major's 'Back to Basics' speech was about personal morality. and thus done much to ensure that the Tories became figures of ridicule for the rest of Major's time in power as one juicy scandal followed another.

Collins lost to another Tim: Tim Farron.

As to Ed Davey's interview, the big news is that he is happy to discuss Europe:

He said his party would be pushing for a new trade deal with the EU to replace the “appalling” one signed by Johnson when he was prime minister. He added his party’s long-term policy was to rejoin the single market. 

“If you don’t put a better trading relationship with Europe in as part of that mix, you’re not going to get the economy sparking again,” he said, though he noted his EU counterparts had been clear that for now “the single market ain’t on the table”.

And, something that is hard to reconcile with his bullish talk of Lib Dem prospects earlier in the interview, he thinks there is a good chance of a hung parliament.

Terry Venables and the summer of 1996

The first Chelsea game I can remember is the 1967 FA Cup Final, when we lost 2-1 to Spurs. Terry Venables, a former Chelsea favourite, was playing for our opponents.

Legend has it that he was in the habit of stopping the Chelsea team in the tunnel after the manager Tommy Docherty's team talk and countermand it with one of his own. Docherty tired of this, sold him and bought Charlie Cooke to be our playmaker instead.

But then his mother had told the Chelsea official who came to her house with a contract for the young Venables to sign that her boy would make a better manager than player, because he never stopped talking about the game.

Terry Venables' death has made me remember the summer of 1996. England's 4-1 group victory in the European team championship, which we hosted, is just about the finest performance by an England team that I have seen. Every time we attacked we looked like scoring.

England felt European that June. There were visiting supporters from 15 other countries (including Scotland), the sun shone and even we played sexy football.

Venables' charm was part of the attractive England package, and since he was forced out of the England job over his financial affairs - a Labour MP called Kate Hoey was among his most persistent critics - being an England fan has rarely felt as good

It's more evidence that as far as Britain was cool in the 1990s, it was cool under John Major rather than Tony Blair. Oh yes.

John Major is not a Nigerian but a Victorian

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Simon Hoggart had a theory about John Major's way of speaking:

It was always my theory that John Major was a Nigerian who had learned English from the battered paperbacks he had borrowed at an up-country British Council library. Hence his curiously dated language, such as "fine words butter no parsnips".

But the latest edition of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart's Leading podcast makes it clear that this is not the reason Major talks the way he does.

The true explanation is that John Major is a Victorian. or at least learnt many figures of speech from a Victorian. His father was born in 1879 and was 64 when Major was born.

In the presenters' discussion after the interview, Campbell suggests that Major's old-fashioned way of talking was one of the things that made him popular and that he owes it to his unusual background.

Lord Bonkers 30 years ago: The rediscovery of Charles James Fox's left kneecap

It's the question that almost no one is asking, and I've put off answering it as long as I decently can, but it's time to find out what Lord Bonkers was saying in the December of 30 years ago.

A little context... In October 1992 John Major's government had announced plans to close almost all Britain's remaining coal mines. Demonstrations broke out in genteel places like Cheltenham and Paddy Ashdown joined John Smith in speaking at a trade union rally in London.

Over to Lord B.

Saturday

Quite the most striking development of recent weeks has been the new-found popularity if coal mining. Where once the best county families hastened to put their sons' names for Eton or Harrow, they now clamour to get them into Vane Tempest of Point of Ayr. 

Such has been the enthusiasm displayed that I spend the day giving serious thought to reopening Bonkers Main. I have seldom ventured down the pit of late, but during the last war it did prove a useful refuge for the choicer items from the National Liberal Club's cellar and some priceless relics of Whig statesmen.

Thus, though the Rutland coalfield was never among the most profitable, we may yet be cheered by the rediscovery of Charles James Fox's left kneecap.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10,

A psychologist explains how politicians evade questions

The psychologist Professor Peter Bull talks about his research into the way politicians answer questions - or fail to answer them.

In my day job, I wrote a media release that led to widespread coverage of Professor Bull's research last year.

Here is an example from the Sun:

Theresa May has answered barely a quarter of questions put to her - making her the most evasive Tory PM in 40 years. 

Boffins at the University of York studied the way Mrs May dealt with broadcast interviews and compared it with the responses of David Cameron, John Major and Margaret Thatcher. 

They found that in the course of two interviews after she became Prime Minister in 2016 and four during the course of the 2017 general election, Mrs May only answered 27 per cent of the questions put to her. 

In contrast, Mr Cameron answered 34 per cent of questions in the 2015 general election, while both Mr Major in the 1992 election and Margaret Thatcher in 1987 answered 39 per cent of questions they were asked.

Nice use of 'boffins' there.

John Major's eulogy at Paddy Ashdown's memorial service

A memorial service for Paddy Ashdown was held at Westminster Abbey today, attended by four former prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Sir John Major.

Here is John Major's eulogy for Paddy.

Former Tory MP for Harborough is acting for John Major

Sir John Major, reports the Guardian has said he will seek the high court’s permission to join the case brought by the anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller.

It aims to prevent Boris Johnson proroguing parliament from next week until mid-October.

And who is acting for the former prime minister?

Step forward Lord Garnier, who as Edward Garnier was Conservative MP for Harborough from 1992 to 2017.

Oh yes.

Six of the Best 862

Rachel Reeves celebrates the way women MPs have transformed politics,

The Conservatives - in government and beyond - have stopped thinking about economics, says.Stian Westlake.

"Despite the internal divisions he did keep his Party together. There was the impressive fourth election victory in 1992, and he revived the party’s social agenda. The economy grew continuously, and he bequeathed one of the best economic legacies to his successors." Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams argue that John Major's premiership deserves more credit than it is usually given.

"Asian parents do their utmost and hammer a sense of worth and an unrivalled work ethic into their children because of the graft it took to get to these shores and knowing the fundamental truth that the quickest way to be accepted into a native culture is to be valuable to them. Be a doctor. Be an engineer. Be a Test match opener." Vithushan Ehantharajah on the fall and rise of Haseeb Hameed.

James Parker deciphers the mystery of Joy Division.

Anne McLean follows the adventures of a young Victorian trainspotter: "The beautifully composed photographs are complemented by a set of letters written by George to his brother James in the mid-1890s. These tell us that his hobby outside school hours was photographing locomotives, especially the most modern ones for the time."

Why Tim Farron is more efficient than the privatised railways

The Financial Times has been to the Lake District and covered Tim Farron's success in restoring a service to the line from Oxenholme to Kendal and Windermere when Northern Rail could not run one.

Tim told the paper's reporter:

"It was a real window into the fragmentation of the railways. How could we do in a weekend what Northern and the Department for Transport could not? If you have got the will to make things happen you can make it happen.”

I wouldn't underestimate Tim's will, but his first point is the most important one. The management of the railways is now impossibly complicated.

When John Major first decided to privatise the railways (something Margaret Thatcher had always shied away from) his instinct was to recreate the Big Four companies of his boyhood.

But the money men and ideologues got to him and we ended up with the railways being run as much like the air travel industry as possible. Not only was the track owned by a different company from the ones that ran the trains: those trains were owned by other companies and leased to the people who ran them.

With so many joins, the system leaked money all over the place. So government had to step in, with the result that the system is now more centrally controlled than it ever was under British Rail. New trains are now chosen by civil servants, not railway people.

I often hear British Rail condemned by people who are too young to remember it, but it was much better at adapting to meet consumer demand than the railways are today.

There were long holiday trains every day in summer from Nottingham and Derby to Skegness. There was also a Saturday train from Leicester to the West Country on Saturdays in the holiday season.

I once caught it as far as Exeter. got the bus to Bude and had found a room for the night by three in the afternoon.

The renationalisation of the railways could attract me, but I am certain that, whoever owns them, the tracks and trains that run on them should be owned by the same company.

Will the collapse of Carillion kibosh rail improvements at Market Harborough?

The straightening of the railway through Market Harborough and the improvement of the station were in the hands of a company called Carillion. You may have heard of them.

So far they have demolished an old goods shed and got a long way with constructing a new car park so that rails can be laid across the land occupied by the current one.

How will Carillion's collapse affect the project?

The Leicester Mercury reports that a Network Rail spokeswoman was "unable" to comment on Market Harborough.

It does, however, quote a general statement on the planned Midland main line improvements that gets slightly less encouraging every time you read it:

Carillion’s work for Network Rail continues for the time being as Network Rail works with the official receiver and special manager to ensure the continuity of its project work. 

Passengers can be reassured that their services will be running as normal today as Carillion’s work for Network Rail does not involve the day-to-day running of the railway. 

Our aim is to ensure, as far as possible, that this news has as little impact as possible on our projects to grow and expand the railway network.

More and more, I feel that the problem the railways face is not so much that they were privatised as the baroque structure that privatisation left them with.

If he was determined to sell off the railways, then John Major's initial instinct to recreate the Big Four railway companies that existed between 1923 and 1947, and owned both the trains and the track, was surely the right one.

Stephen Reicher on the psychology of authoritarian populism

This an audio recording of Professor Stephen Reicher's lecture on the psychology of authoritarian populism that I attended last month.

As I blogged when I got home that evening:

Professor Reicher's argument that if we are to understand the appeal of Donald Trump (and of other authoritarian populists) we have to get away from the idea that the people who voted for him are merely wicked or stupid.

It is worth taking the time to listen to it. His arguments are obviously relevant to winning the debate on Brexit.

The Boo Radleys: Wake up Boo!

Wikipedia elucidates:

Despite critical acclaim and a cult fanbase, the Boo Radleys were still largely unknown to the general public by the time the Britpop phenomenon broke into the mainstream in 1995. 

This changed when the band released the upbeat single "Wake Up Boo!" in the spring of that year. It made the Top 10 in the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number 9. The single remained on the chart for two months, by far the band's longest run for any of its singles ... [Martin] Carr describes writing the song watching The Big Breakfast after a night on acid.

The Boo Radleys were around well before Britpop, but this reminds us that the phenomenon happened under John Major, not Tony Blair.

Recent commentators have often got that wrong, just as they do not realise that punk was a reaction to Jim Callaghan's government not Margaret Thatcher's.

The Economist has endorsed the Liberal Democrats - and the Tories should be worried

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I must begin by apologising to Stephen Tall for stealing his headline, but I have had it in mind to write a post on these lines from some time.

And today's news that the Economist has endorsed the Liberal Democrats has prompted me to do it.

The endorsement is grudging:

Many moderate Conservative and Labour MPs could join a new liberal centre party—just as parts of the left and right have recently in France. So consider a vote for the Lib Dems as a down-payment for the future. Our hope is that they become one element of a party of the radical centre, essential for a thriving, prosperous Britain.

But the fact that it has been made at all shows how far the Conservatives are estranging themselves from their usual business supporters.

Rather than aiming to satisfy those supporters, the party's leaders are flattering their own backwoods on Europe.

As I wrote in March:

I remember a Labour-supporting friend who was in North Devon during the 1979 general election campaign speaking with something close to awe of the acres of good suiting on the platform at the Conservatives' meetings. 

But the party does not look like or feel like that today. 

The Tories have discovered ideology and, even more, they have discovered grievance. They are less the party of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo than the party of people who believe they have been cheated. 

The culprits vary - immigrants, experts, the European Union, latte-drinkers, refugees, the BBC - but the feeling is widespread. 

Only radical action, those members and activists believe, can remove the hurt and see justice done.

The last time there was an outbreak of this feeling in the Conservative Party was after their crushing defeat by Tony Blair's Labour in 1997.

Rather than elect Kenneth Clarke to busk it and keep them cheerful while they worked out what the hell they were going to do, Tory members elected first William Hague and then Iain Duncan Smith as leader because they liked their right-wing views.

And the time before that was over Europe under John Major.

But I am reminded of an earlier incident, which I wrote about for Comment is Free some years ago:

I was a newly elected Liberal Alliance councillor back in 1986 when the Thatcher government began consulting over the introduction of the poll tax. 

Conservative members didn't want it phased in over 10 years: they wanted it at once. You could see the pound signs in their eyes as they calculated how much they and their neighbours would save.

If it had been phased in over a decade then the poll tax might well have stuck. But Margaret Thatcher made the mistake of listening to her own backwoods, and doing so ended her premiership.

From all of which I conclude that the Conservative Party's estrangement from the Economist will end it tears.