There's no reason why the Tories should escape the fate of other centre-Right parties across the West

No political party has a God-given right to exist forever. This applies even to the Conservative Party, the most successful formation in Western democratic history, which has, until now, specialised in u-turning and absorbing rival ideologies to survive.

Its performance to date has been astonishing: the Whigs are long gone, but the Tories remain, having reinvented themselves more often than a brand of detergent. Since 1929, the first election for which women and men were enfranchised equally, they have held power for 57 out of 89 years.

They survived the repeal of the Corn Laws (despite bitter divisions), the 1906 wipeout (they bought into Liberal reforms), 1945 (they embraced Labour’s massive state intervention) and Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide (they accepted shifting social mores and veered towards social democracy).

If like William F Buckley, the US journalist, you believe “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so”, it is clear that the Tory party isn’t really conservative at all. Its essence isn’t libertarian or classical liberal either.

With the glorious exception of the Forties with Sir Winston Churchill and the Eighties with Lady Thatcher, when the party was led by idiosyncratic giants, it has followed social change rather than driven it. It is best understood as a brand franchise, a vehicle for pursuing power, while preserving the rough contours of society; on that metric, the strategy has “worked”.