With the Conservative Party now a shadow of its former self, Broadstairs writer Melissa Todd looks back at how it has navigated crises over the years - and what the future could hold…

As the dog returns to its vomit, though less enthusiastically, so the Conservative Party slavers over the same stale pool of potential leadership candidates: the same stinking, disgraced names.

Who would you trust to pull you out of the puke—Priti Patel, former big tobacco lobbyist and opponent of same-sex marriage? Robert Jenrick, with his questionable building deals? Or maybe Kemi Badenoch, who doesn’t care about colonialism? It’s all so unspeakably dreary.

What next for the Conservative Party — the world’s longest-ruling centre-right party, now reduced to its smallest number of seats since 1832? What, even, does Conservatism mean anymore?

Conservatism has all but shed its 19th-century ideals, while Keir Starmer has enthusiastically adopted them, speaking constantly of duty and public service, unable to get enough of King Charles. But what would Queen Victoria's Conservative Prime Ministers Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli have thought of Michael Gove, the “Tory” who had the gall to brief the Murdoch press on a private conversation he’d had with his own Queen? Lord Palmerston would have insisted on pistols at dawn.

Once the Conservative Party was all about community, about one nation. About rich men in castles, poor men at gates, each with their allotted roles. “The one eternal sight of England,” Tory grandee Stanley Baldwin said a century ago, was “a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been England since England was a land.”

In 1993, Prime Minister John Major still held that “50 years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.”

You will look long and hard for lines like these in Liz Truss’ literary output. Margaret Thatcher loved glad-handing the Party faithful at county fairs; Boris Johnson, less so. Thatcher’s pose as champion of tradition covered a radical reinvention of her party as one of tax cuts, small government, big finance and freed-up animal passions, but now, the Thatcher revolution has run its course and nothing has replaced it.

“Since the financial meltdown in 2008, the Conservative Party has simply had nothing to say. No wonder membership has dwindled from 2.8 million 70 years ago to barely 173,000 today…”

In part, the Tories’ problem is that Labour stole their lunch. Sloughing off the party's image as one of unions, inflation and strikes, Tony Blair reimagined it as a home of law and order, stable sterling and special relationships with America. By wooing private investors to pay the bills and Robert Murdoch to say how great this was, he left Conservatism stranded.

But in bigger part, the Tories’ problem is that the world has changed. Globalisation, mass migration, climate change and the rise of China have left them trying to answer questions that no one is asking any more. Especially since the financial meltdown in 2008, the Conservative Party has simply had nothing to say. No wonder membership has dwindled from 2.8 million 70 years ago to barely 173,000 today.

This is bad for Britain in many ways, the worst of them being that the far-right threatens to fill the void. In this year’s general election, the Conservatives took 23 percent of the vote; Reform, 17 percent. It doesn’t take an evil genius to see both parties' path to power beginning by joining forces.

That would be a tragedy for this country. The Reform Party hates Britain. It hates everything Britain represents. Not only values like tolerance, decency and fair play, although certainly it does hate those, but also our most cherished institutions: the BBC, RNLI, the National Trust. These make Britain unique and magnificent. Reform wants to destroy them, turning this country into the most barbarous version of American Republicans’ already-barbaric vision of their own country, with phony culture wars replacing any policies actually aimed at improving working people’s lives.

Expect to see attacks on women’s rights and LGBT rights. Expect to see an end to that deeply conservative belief that people should just be left alone to pursue their own projects and ambitions in peace, puttering around in garden sheds and DIY centres. This was the very best of Conservative values, back when they worked.

But do not abandon all hope just yet. The Conservative Party has ridden out worse crises than this. Robert Peel split its ranks over Ireland in 1846; Joseph Chamberlain (father of the “peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain) repeated the feat over free trade in 1906. Both times the party went down to epic electoral defeat; both times, it bounced back. Lurching to the lunatic right is not the only option.

Some people call the Conservatives the Stupid Party, but they’re not. They’re just a pragmatic party. They do whatever it takes to get power. They will only move rightwards if the British people reward that—so don’t.