Anyone in any doubt that there is a concerted attempt by Brexit extremists to take over the Conservative party should toddle along to the Leave.EU website. There you will find these full instructions on deselecting Tory MPs you don’t care for.

Under the heading “DESELECT THE TORY TRAITORS. THE TIME IS NOW. WHO’S NEXT?” you will be invited to fill in a form giving your contact details, (consenting for them to be shared), your membership number and when you joined:

“We are putting together a group of activists in each target constituency. As soon as we’ve gathered enough interest, we shall put everyone who has agreed to participate in touch with a local organiser who will get the process underway.”

The answer to the question “WHO’S NEXT?" is David Gauke, Lord Chancellor and secretary of state for justice, who has represented South West Hertfordshire since 2005. Tonight he faces his tormentors at the Kings Langley Community Centre.

His crime, as set out in the motion put down for tonight’s special general meeting by the hard men and women of Tring, Rickmansworth and Berkhamsted is to have “obstructed” Brexit. Certain members, the motion says, now have “No confidence in our MP, David Gauke, on account of his wilful obstruction to the implementation of the result of the 2016 referendum, and his refusal to act on the commitments in the Conservative manifesto at the time of the last election, and on which he was elected”.

No matter that Gauke has in fact voted for the May Brexit deal three times, just the same as Michael Gove or Jeremy Hunt did, or that Bros Johnson ended up voting for it at the third time of asking too. No matter that no one in the Conservative minority government has been able to “act on” their 2017 manifesto because they lost their majority. Why not deselect Theresa May?

Gauke has made it clear that he will not support a no-deal Brexit. Previous briefings to the press from him and other like-minded cabinet colleagues, such as Amber Rudd and Greg Clark, indicated that they would, or did, block no deal in May’s cabinet. Leave.EU did not like that.

Gauke is one of their latest targets, along with Dominic Grieve, Anna Soubry (who has since left in despair), Heidi Allen (ditto), Sarah Wollaston (ditto), Nick Boles (ditto), Ed Vaizey, Greg Clark (business secretary), Oliver Letwin and Sam Gymiah.

Gymiah hardly ingratiated himself to them for his stand on a second referendum (inevitable as it happens, but still). In his East Surrey constituency the Leave.EU gang have gleefully amassed the needed 50 members to inflict the harassment of a deselection process on the man they call “Smarmy Sam”.

‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Show all 20 1 /20 ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies The Beatles "Brexit is like Liverpool trashing all its links to The Beatles and spending all its time and energy building Esther McVey World." Shutterstock / terry bouch ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies The number seven "Trying to understand Brexit is like trying to figure out what colour the letter seven smells like." Shutterstock / jgl247 ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Pilots "Brexit is like being in a plane hurtling towards the ground with the pilot and co-pilot arguing over who would crash it better." Shutterstock / View Apart ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Operation "Brexit is like going to the doctor, being told you need an operation, agreeing to it, then finding out they are going to cut off your cock & sew it to your forhead... ...but refusing to get a 2nd opinion." Shutterstock / Dmytro Zinkevych ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Wall "My mentions have taught me that Brexit is like Trump’s wall. For its devoted fans it has a symbolic value totally unrelated to its workability, its true cost or the glaring self-interest of its proposers, whereas non-believers see nothing but a deranged and costly vanity project." Shutterstock / Tony Craddock ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Skydive "brexit is like a sitcom where at the start of the episode the main character tells a casual lie about being able to skydive to impress someone and now they're at the end of the episode in a plane about to jump" Shutterstock / Mauricio Graiki ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Crumble "Brexit is like if Farage & Johnson said “May we make you an *amazing* apple crumble?” & then 18 months later handed you a leaking bag of maggots & offal. You shouldn’t have to eat it." Shutterstock / CKP1001 ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Punch "‘Asking me to support Brexit is like asking me to punch my constituents in the face,’ said Anna Turley, the Labour MP for Redcar, which voted 66:34 to leave. ‘It doesn’t make it easier if you tell me my constituents want to be punched.’" Shutterstock / ZoneCreative ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Fire "Watching this government deal with Brexit is like being locked outside your house while you can see people inside setting fire to the furniture as the law’s telling you you can’t go in and stop them." Shutterstock / Gorb Andrii ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Villains "Brexit is like living in a superhero movie that has no heroes, just loads of incompetent villains fighting over who is more evil." Shutterstock / Aisyaqilumaranas ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Book "Brexit is like a bad novel. You are so far into it you just want to skip to the end to see if it ended as badly as it had begun. (You throw the book at the wall when you realise it is the first book in a trilogy)." Shutterstock / Stokkete ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Cricket "Watching Brexit is like trying to reverse engineer the rules of cricket by listening to the radio. I have absolutely no idea what is going on." Shutterstock / ChrisVanLennepPhoto ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Car "Brexit is like the UK took a motorway exit, then found the road turning into a rutted grassy track, and now the car's stuck in a muddy field, there's no help in sight, it's getting dark, everyone's shouting at the driver, and the passengers are beginning to worry about food." Shutterstock / Kolbakova Olga ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Cable "Watching Brexit is like watching someone try and plug a coaxial aerial cable into a HDMI port. There is a lot of anger, a lot of swearing, and a lot of remarks about how this used to work before." Shutterstock / Elnur ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Windows "#Brexit is like going back to Windows 3.1" ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Liars "I'm sure most people remember a kid at school who just lied constantly? Who refused to back down, however outlandish the lie, and however it was disproven? Brexit is like all of those kids from every school have got together, and are now running the country." Shutterstock / chairavee laphom ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Donors "Trying to extricate ourselves from the EU, and Brexit, is like a multiple transplant patient attempting to give all the donated organs back." Shutterstock / Luuuusa ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Electricity "Paying my taxes to pay for Brexit is like asking a guy on death row if he has any change to put in the meter for the electric chair." Shutterstock / Fer Gregory ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Bandersnatch "Brexit is like watching Bandersnatch with your bae where bae is 70,000 Conservative party members hogging the PlayStation controller & choosing the most WTF option every time.! Shutterstock / George Dolgikh ‘Brexit is like...’ The Top 20 Twitter analogies Constipation "Brexit is like the shit that never comes. Total constitutional constipation. Ironically Brexit also sounds like a constipation relief medicine." Shutterstock / sasha2109

It’s entryism, as Gymiah shrewdly points out, but “hiding in plain sight”. Leave.EU makes no bones about their strategy, tweeting: “With a new leader and potential election, now is the time to make the Conservative party conservative again. If we fail? The Brexit Party wipes the floor with them. Win win! “

The evidence suggests that this influx of new Conservative members, strangely at a time when it is in decline on every other metric, are the “Blukip” or “Blue Wave” surge of hard Brexiteers, there to capture the party, and fairly brazenly, setting up their own organisational structure – a party within a party.

As the excellent research conducted by the academic Tim Bale makes clear, these newer members are markedly more Eurosceptic and pro-Brexit than the older vintage.

All that said, it has also to be admitted that these people are mostly Tories in heart and spirit. They are, indeed, much like Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, ex-Tories for whom everything started to go wrong when Margaret Thatcher was deposed in 1990. They drifted away in the 1990s and 2000s towards Ukip and, to borrow a phrase, now want their party back, shorn of John Major’s desire to be “at the heart of Europe”, David Cameron’s green fetishes and political correctness, and Theresa May's hopeless leadership.

Hence their enthusiasm for “Brexit Boris” as the British Trump. Hence also Nigel Farage's remark that he can be Boris' best friend (if he does what Farage wants) or his worst enemy.

The beleaguered Tory chairman, Brandon Lewis, says that all this deselection stuff is for the birds: “Within our party’s rules [these votes] don’t actually have any direct meaning, it’s a difficult process for the party to be going through and I’d rather not be seeing that.”

“My job as chairman is to make sure the rules are properly followed, it’s up to the Member of Parliament if they want to stand again in a general election to ask to be readopted.”

I admire his chutzpah, but any political party, in the end, belongs to its members and they can make the rules. They can put up with what’s happening to it, try and stop it, or, as may be happening in too many places, join in with it. The old Burkean notion that an MP is a representative not a delegate, and that he or she owes all their electors their wisdom and conscience is gone. Like the Militant tendency in the Labour party during the eighties, they want their Tory MPs to be “accountable” and to do as they’re told.

Deselections have happened in the Tory party at least as far back as the 1950s (for example over Suez). Indeed Winston Churchill was such a pain in the era of appeasement that Conservative Central Office made some discreet enquiries with his local party about his future prospects as an official candidate. So Gauke and Gymiah are in good company.

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Yet in the past deselections and unseatings were extremely rare in Tory ranks. Now they are becoming routine. It is bizarre and deeply disturbing. The only saving grace is that no moderate sensible voter will vote for a death cult like that.

We are witnessing the slow death of the Conservative party, and its unhappy metamorphosis into a narrow, obsessional sect, consumed by Europe, by immigration and by cutting their own taxes. Waving their union flags they are going to hell in a handcart with Boris Johnson. Fine, except they’re taking the rest of us with them.