THE Conservative Party likes to think of itself as the natural party of government. Whereas continental conservatives might die in the ditch to protect the landed aristocracy or the established church, the Tories embrace change in order to manage it. Robert Peel abolished the Corn Laws, which provided subsidies to land owners. Benjamin Disraeli called for an extension of the franchise. R.A. Butler helped to build the post-war welfare state. The party that produced Britain’s first Jewish and female prime ministers puts the disciplined exercise of power above mere dogma.

Yet the party of government is busy rendering Britain ungovernable. The Conservatives first unleashed the horror of Brexit because they couldn’t stop “banging on about Europe”, and then made a complete and utter hash of implementing it. This week’s turmoil at the heart of government could look tame compared with what will happen later this year when Parliament has to legislate. The best that Britain can hope for is a deal that leaves the country in a worse position than it is currently in. The nightmare option of crashing out of Europe without a deal is looking more likely with every tick of the clock. There is only one party that is responsible for this shambles: the Conservatives.

There are lots of reasons why the party of government has become the party of anarchy. The whips have forgotten the art of keeping order. The brightest right-wingers have abandoned national politics for global business. A band of fanatics have sold themselves as Conservatives. But one thing above all others explains the current mess: the Conservative Party, or large chunks of it, has forgotten the basic principles of conservatism. It has ceased to think like a conservative party, and it won’t recover its governing ability until it relearns that difficult art.

The first principle of conservatism is to be sceptical of pie-in-the-sky schemes. John Stuart Mill liked to mock Tories as “the stupid party”. Walter Bagehot replied that stupidity was a virtue rather than a vice—the Tories succeeded precisely because they preferred common sense to “remote ideas”, and pragmatic compromise to ideological principles. Butler summed up the Conservative approach to politics when he described politics as “the art of the possible”. Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher, said that to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.”

The Brexit wing of the Conservative Party is the party of pie in the sky. It has reversed every one of Oakeshott’s phrases. Britain has been a member of the European Union for 45 years and was the leading architect of the single market. But the Brexiteers have decided to dump half a century of history, bought at the cost of hard negotiation and compromise, in favour of airy talk of “sovereignty” and “control”. They sold Brexit to the British people without specifying what it might mean, making Utopian promises about having cake and eating it while making effortless trade deals hither and yon. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, used a revealing phrase in his resignation letter this week when he said that the Brexit “dream is dying”. At its best, conservatism is about doubt and deliberation, not dreams.

The second principle of conservatism is to put country before party. Peel split the Tories over the Corn Laws because he thought that free trade was in the national interest (tellingly, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiteer, has taken to condemning Peel for this decision). Margaret Thatcher risked doing the same because she thought the country faced a choice between radical change and rapid decline. But over Europe, Conservatives have done the opposite. David Cameron did a reverse-Peel, calling a calamitous referendum in order to settle a civil war within his party. He then piled ignominy upon idiocy by rewarding party hacks who had contrived to lose an unlosable campaign with ambassadorships and lordships galore. Theresa May’s worst decisions have all been driven by a desire to appease the Brexit wing of her party. She announced her decision to trigger Article 50 exit negotiations during a party conference speech designed to delight the party faithful, in perhaps the most expensive applause line in history.

Conservatives’ third principle is to rely on the judgment of a governing class that adopts talented people into its ranks. Belief in the untutored wisdom of the masses is the stuff of socialist fantasies. Conservatives believe in disciplining democracy through constitutional restraint and handing day-to-day decision-making to people who are skilled in the exercise of power. Thatcher rightly denounced referendums as devices of “demagogues and dictators”. But the Brexit faction of her party has abandoned conservatism for Jacobinism, denouncing the House of Lords and the judiciary for frustrating the “will of the people” and badmouthing civil servants such as Olly Robbins, the prime minister’s Brexit adviser.

The natural party of opposition

There are encouraging signs that the Conservative Party is relearning its conservative principles. The pragmatic faction of the party—always the majority of Tory MPs—is learning to fight with the same ruthlessness that the Brexiteers have brought to their cause. Theresa May is pursuing a quintessentially conservative policy of managed disillusionment, forcing the Brexiteers to confront the real world of hard choices and difficult trade-offs. Responsible members of the party are reasserting control after the populist frenzy unleashed by the referendum. It is by no means certain that the British voters will forgive the Conservatives for the disaster they have unleashed over the past few years. But if they do, it will be because the party has rediscovered, after a period of madness, what it means to be a conservative.