In all the noise surrounding this week’s reshuffle, one sound in particular has been unmistakable: that of rising Tory angst about the party’s future. It might be strange to witness such self-doubt at the moment Britain’s departure from the EU looks set to realise so many Conservative dreams. But Brexit is perhaps one of those classic pyrrhic victories that cheers the troops while sowing the seeds of a seismic defeat that may lie just around the corner.

Yes, it is quite something that the Tories are still neck and neck with Labour in the polls, and they could still win the next election. But their position nonetheless suggests encroaching twilight, for reasons that run much deeper than the prime minister’s shortcomings, the fact that she is now on to her third work and pensions secretary in 18 months, or the way that Jeremy Hunt’s howling failures have been rewarded with even more responsibility.

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The evidence is plain. At the general election, Labour was hugely ahead in all age categories under 40. The fact that the polarities were completely reversed among the over-50s heralded a new politics deeply divided along generational lines, with the Tories seemingly on the wrong side of history. Six months on, the spectacle of Conservative politicians now believing that their revival might lie in pirouettes over foxhunting or a new drive on “school standards” compounds the sense of a force nominally in power but all at sea.

A question: do the Tories meaningfully exist any more beyond Westminster and the closed circles of power and influence highlighted by the Toby Young fiasco? Corporate donations and hired help might just about get them through election campaigns. But while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party can justifiably claim to be a mass movement, the Conservatives have not released any membership figures since 2013, and are reckoned to have as few as 70,000 members. According to recent polling, 71% of Conservative members are men and 44% are 65 or over. More than half of card-carrying Tories still support the death penalty; three-quarters agree that “young people don’t have enough respect for traditional British values”. The grassroots may have liked Priti Patel’s claim this week that they are “the beating heart of our movement”, but that may well be part of the problem.

The loudest elements of the Tory tribe speak a paranoid, backward-looking language, at odds with anything modern

That said, even as the Tories have ossified, the long, fitful process of modernisation that began in the wake of the Major years has had some successes. Nineteen minority-ethnic Conservative MPs does not seem like much, but such figures as Patel, Sajid Javid and the newly appointed deputy chairman, James Cleverly, attest to progress. At least at the top, the party’s acceptance of gay and lesbian people is obvious. David Cameron’s embrace of diversity and social liberalism combined with Conservative belief in free-market economics to produce at least flashes of a libertarian, meritocratic politics that might speak powerfully to the Britain of the future. George Osborne now seems to be keeping this credo warm at the Evening Standard; whether it has any serious chance of revival remains unclear.

Brexit, after all, has turned out to be this strand of Conservatism’s nemesis. Perhaps more than ever, the loudest elements of the Tory tribe speak a paranoid, backward-looking language consciously at odds with anything modern (witness all those front pages of the Daily Mail, and their baiting of any Tory MPs deemed to step out of line). The project of leaving the EU has given new life to such howlingly retrogressive Tories as Liam Fox and the preposterous Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose rise is a pretty sure sign of a party with precious little interest in collectively understanding its predicament.

God knows if enough Conservatives will ever realise it, but the unreconstructed Thatcherism these politicians personify is surely finished. Britain’s housing crisis and the impossibility of home ownership for countless people under 40 surely demand something different. Old Tory watchwords such as aspiration and ambition are too often bywords for debt and insecurity. Privatisation is now less a byword for consumer sovereignty than a signifier of crony capitalism. From time to time, there have been attempts to come up with a Conservatism more relevant to people’s 21st-century problems – “blue-collar Conservatism”, the idea of the Tories as a “workers’ party” – but their legacy seems to amount to little more than a handful of old articles and dormant websites and Twitter feeds.

If a Tory reformation is what is needed, there is a Conservative political tradition that screams out for a revival: pragmatic, moderate, less concerned with ideological purity than steadily getting stuff done. It is one of the grimmer aspects of Theresa May’s fate that in her brief burst of confidence, before the election smashed her dreams to bits, this seemed to be where she was headed. But now she has neither the wit nor political space to develop it.

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Whatever form Conservatism takes, lefties such as me will always see in it a fundamental set of hypocrisies and delusions, and the combination of needless austerity and the lunacy of Brexit may curse the Tory party for a very long time. In the long run, it will be further tested by huge changes to technology, work, and the age balance of the population that are demanding new thinking from all sides. But even so: it surely ought to be doing better than it is.

What of such neglected or abandoned ideas as the “big society” and the northern powerhouse? Conservative leaders could set store by the basic ideals of the market but also be keenly aware of its failures. They could take the bold step of actually building some social housing; they could call out monopolistic train and energy companies and banks in the name of genuine capitalism. Someone at Central Office ought to reread the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott: “To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery … present laughter to utopian bliss.”

This kind of Conservatism would have avoided Brexit like the plague. Still, combine its essential disposition with the Cameron-Osborne era’s modernism, and you might have the start of something. In Scotland, this combination seems to form the essential philosophy of the Tory leader, Ruth Davidson. Meanwhile in England Toryism seems to have been commandeered by a coalition of freaks and throwbacks sitting atop a political machine that is sputtering to a halt. So it is, perhaps, that once-great political empires slowly turn to dust.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist