How to get to that stage? Open primaries would help. In the 1980s, conscious of their electoral weakness among ethnic minorities, and desperate for the support of anyone with a black or brown face, the party sometimes promoted people who were even more eccentric than the average politician. Not any more. To pluck an example at random, the leader of the Conservative MEPs is Syed Kamall, the son of a bus driver from Guyana, a practising Muslim and a tax-cutting Eurosceptic who has fought his way to the leadership without the slightest help from the party hierarchy. There will be many more Syeds – that is, natural free marketeers – who have not joined the Tories for the most basic reason of all: no one has asked.