THE Conservative Party has met with triumph and disaster a number of times since the 1830s, and if it has not treated them just the same, it has at least survived them. There were long periods of uninterrupted rule, such as 1951-64 and 1979-97. There were times of marginalisation, even irrelevancy, like that which followed Robert Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws in 1846 and the one that was ushered in by the victory of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. Today, though, it is experiencing something stranger than either: both. The Tories are weak and strong at the same time.

When the party gathers in Birmingham on September 30th for its annual conference, the evidence of weakness will be plain to see. The party does not have a majority in the House of Commons; Theresa May, the prime minister, is clinging to power through a grubby deal with the ten Northern Irish MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The government’s domestic agenda is so threadbare that there will be no Queen’s Speech (which traditionally lays out the government’s agenda at the beginning of the new parliamentary session) this year.

The government is getting nothing done because Brexit occupies all its time and most of its considerable capacity for internecine warfare. In the referendum of 2016, called by David Cameron to fulfil a pledge in the Tories’ election manifesto the year before, a majority of Tory MPs voted to remain in the EU. The majority of the party’s members and voters wanted to leave, as did enough of the voters for other parties to secure that result. Mrs May, who succeeded Mr Cameron when, seeing what he had wrought, he cut and ran, invoked Article 50 of the EU treaty the following spring; this means Britain is set to leave the EU on Friday March 29th 2019.

Twisted by knaves

Most of the Tory MPs who voted Remain now think that their job is to ensure that Britain stays as close to the EU as it can while still honouring the result of the referendum—the sort of option that has become known as a “soft Brexit”. Some who campaigned for Leave, such as Michael Gove, currently the environment secretary, will accept a moderately soft Brexit as long as it still delivers a decisive break. The “Chequers plan” Mrs May put together in July outlines a softish Brexit in which Britain leaves the EU and its customs union, but seeks to stay in the EU’s single market for goods and, with the help of a special customs arrangement, to avert the need for any physical checks at the Irish border.

The other 27 EU countries rejected the main elements of the Chequers plan at a summit in Salzburg on September 20th. And the Conservatives’ hard-line Brexiteers are having none of it, either. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the head of the European Research Group, which has the backing of up to 80 Tory MPs, talks in characteristic archaisms of it reducing Britain to vassalage. David Davis and Boris Johnson, previously the cabinet minister in charge of negotiating Brexit and the foreign secretary, respectively, quit their posts days after the plan was agreed on. In Mr Johnson’s case opposition to Chequers stems from a desire to be prime minister. For many others it comes from a desire to see no aspect of British life under any sort of EU jurisdiction. A “hard Brexit” of this sort could look something like a free-trade deal, such as the one that the EU has with Canada.

A number of hard Brexiteers are willing to countenance the very hardest option: no deal of any sort, a scenario in which, after the end of March, Britain and the EU treat each other like any other two members of the World Trade Organisation. There have been almost no serious preparations for this, and large businesses, along with most economists, warn that such a sudden rupture would spell doom. But no matter: it would be Britain’s doom.

A policy the rest of the EU rejects and that cannot get through Parliament marks the final debasing of what was once the Tories’ most valuable asset: a reputation for good government. Labour can always rely on being the party of idealism: even if we make a mess of things, we have pure intentions. The Tories’ great selling-point is being the party of competence: even if we do things you’d rather we didn’t, we won’t make a complete hash of it.

It is not just that the party’s Brexit wing contains a lot of people who might politely be described as eccentrics. It is that their presence deprives more sensible Tories of their judgment. Mr Cameron made a fatal error in promising a simple in/out referendum. Mrs May compounded that error first by triggering Article 50 before she needed to, and then by holding an election with a manifesto that went off like a booby-trapped briefcase, thereby losing a modest but quite workable majority.

If that electoral fiasco demonstrated the party’s weakness, not to mention lack of nous, it also showed its surprising strength. The Conservatives won 2.3m more votes than they had two years before under Mr Cameron; they secured their highest share of the vote (42.3%) since Margaret Thatcher’s “Falklands victory” in 1983. And they have a better claim to being a national party than they did under Thatcher, when they risked disappearing in Scotland and the north of England. The election of 2017 saw them increasing their number of parliamentary seats in Scotland from one to 13 and making impressive gains in northern Labour strongholds such as Copeland.

This revival, masked by the first-past-the-post electoral system, has the same source as the party’s division and hopelessness: Brexit. More Britons voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything before. The Tory party not only gave them the opportunity to do so; unlike any other party, it boasted many MPs who shared their views. Voting for Brexit was a gateway drug to voting Tory: the party’s share of the vote among skilled manual workers, 32% in 2015, was 45% in 2017.

The Tories have also, to some extent, begun to look like the country they seek to govern. More than half the party’s MPs are now educated in the state sector (see chart 1); the current cabinet is its first ever to contain no Old Etonians. The elections of 2015 and 2017 brought in 103 new Tory MPs, making up a third of the party in the Commons; they reflect Mr Cameron’s modernising attempt to welcome women, ethnic minorities and social liberals. There are 67 female MPs—just over half the number on the Labour benches, but a significant increase on the 49 who had seats when Mr Cameron came to power. When Mrs May became leader in 2016 the other candidate to survive the second round of voting was another woman, Andrea Leadsom. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, is the first British Asian to hold that job, or indeed any of the great offices of state. The party’s middle ranks contain several talented members of ethnic minorities, such as Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak, Kwasi Kwarteng, Sam Gyimah and James Cleverly. While in coalition with the Liberal Democrats the Tories introduced gay marriage to Britain (though Mrs May’s friends in the DUP are resolutely keeping it out of Northern Ireland). Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Tories and a self-described “shovel-faced lesbian”, is married, pregnant and one of the party’s genuine stars. The Tories can lay claim to some economic successes, as well. The coalition presided over a reasonable accounting with capitalism’s demons after the financial crisis. Unemployment has fallen to 4%, a four-decade low. Inflation hovers around 2%. Income inequality appears to have declined over the past decade. The public finances are heading towards balance.

And they have had good fortune in their opposition. The party remains level with Labour in opinion polls despite the turmoil created by Brexit and the drag of incumbency (see chart 2). The one thing that Conservatives of all stripes agree on is that Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran MP on the Labour Party’s hard left who became its leader in 2015, is “the best recruiting sergeant we could have”. Tories and non-partisan pollsters generally agree that if Labour had a more centrist leader the Conservatives would be a good 15 points behind in the polls. The fact that Mr Corbyn now looks immovable may be bad for the country. But it is certainly good for the Conservatives. The parliamentary party also has a robust diversity of views, thrown into unhelpful relief by arguments about Brexit, from which to draw when considering its future. It is possible to divide them into three camps: Thatcherites, New Dealers and the One Nation faction.

Mr Rees-Mogg sees the past in the future

The Thatcherites, perhaps the largest group, come in two flavours, one socially conservative, one more liberal. Mr Rees-Mogg is the most outspoken member of the socially conservative faction, which overlaps with the Brexiteer faction more than any other does. Liz Truss, the chief secretary of the Treasury, is the champion of the socially liberal faction. She is keen on pushing market solutions into new arenas; but she also wants a party of modern sexual attitudes. Mr Javid straddles the divide between the two groups: he has a picture of Thatcher in his office, but as the child of immigrants was able to weather the recent storm over the “hostile environment” for migration in the Home Office in a way a white Thatcherite would have found much harder.

Worn-out tools

The second group, the New Dealers, are rethinking Thatcherism’s bedrock belief in free markets in the light of the global financial crisis, stagnant living standards and the rise of populism on both the left and the right. As Mr Gove puts it, “It’s no longer possible to replay the hit records of the 1980s, only louder.” New Dealers are open to radical and somewhat interventionist ideas for boosting productivity growth, “rebalancing” the economy by region, sector and class, and preventing rent-seeking. They know that Labour’s economic championing of “the many, not the few” resonates, and that if Tories do not reform British capitalism it will suffer a far worse fate in other hands.

Nick Boles, the MP for Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, thinks that the Tories should model themselves on Teddy Roosevelt, challenging the new high-tech “trusts” and championing the rights of consumers. Some have a more positive vision of building on Britain’s strengths. Mr Gyimah, the minister for higher education, argues that Britain has big advantages when it comes to innovation: impressive fundamental research; a first-rate regulatory regime; a bunch of good high-tech businesses, particularly in fintech; and a flexible economy that puts few barriers in the way of expanding firms. “The north of England has more universities in the world’s top 100 than the rest of Europe combined,” he says.

One Nation Tories hark back to a philosophy invented by Benjamin Disraeli, one of the great Victorian prime ministers, which dominated the party from the 1950s to the 1970s; basically traditionalist, moderately reforming, friendly to business but at the same time plausibly cast as being on the side of the common man. One Nationers retreated before Thatcher; against the likes of Mr Rees-Mogg or John Redwood, a former Welsh secretary, they fancy their chances a bit more. When Justine Greening, a former education secretary, says that the best way to prevent the country from disintegrating into hostile tribes is to provide people with equal opportunity and social inclusion, she is the voice of the One Nation faction. Chloe Smith, the minister for the constitution, argues that this philosophy applies not just to social and economic problems but also to breaching ideological rifts, such as that over Brexit, and the decline of a common cultural frame of reference into a digital cacophony.

Some of the divisions, exacerbated by Brexit, run deep; there is much that divides a hard-Brexiteer like Mr Redwood from a One Nationer like Anna Soubry, and it is often bitter. But in general this is the sort of pluralist party for which one might hold out hope; it feels more like a party of ideas than it has for some time. Ms Truss says that Brexit has had a “year zero” effect on the party, forcing it to go back to first principles and think again about how to run the country after Britain leaves the EU.

But that is the party in Westminster. The party in the country is much more Brexit-y, significantly more right-wing, considerably less intellectually adventurous and increasingly elderly. It is also very small. In the 1950s the Conservative Party had 3m members. Its youth wing was the biggest in Europe. Today it has about 124,000 members and “young Tory” is an oxymoron. The Mile End Institute of Queen Mary College, London, calculates that 44% of its members are over 65, compared with 30% of the other main parties.

Mr Johnson was the future, in the past A shrinking, Blimpish party brings with it various drawbacks. It provides little money: the party got £1m in the form of dues last year compared with Labour’s £16m. This makes the party all the more dependent on the rich. The older membership cannot match the Labour Party’s ground game; the Mile End Institute notes that Tory Party members were responsible for just 262,150 “campaign activities” during the election of 2017 compared with 1,385,520 for the Labour Party. Tory YouTube channels make for sorry watching.

The unforgiving minute

The problem extends beyond Conservative members to Conservative voters. Older voters, who like Brexit more, vote Tory more, too. But they are in sympathy with what they see as the party’s values, not necessarily its policies. Thatcher’s lesson was that the best way to revive ailing British businesses was to subject them to a dose of global competition; Europe was welcome as a vast marketplace, just not as a quasi-state. But the party’s supporters are less interested in such invigorating competition. It is not for nothing that the heart of the Leave campaign was a pledge to spend more on that quintessentially statist British institution, the National Health Service, emblazoned on the side of that quintessentially British vehicle, a big red bus.

As to younger voters: in 2017 the Tories won only 27% of the vote among 18- to 34-year-olds and 33% among 35- to 44-year-olds. Again, this is Brexit at work. Younger voters, who mostly backed Remain, see the Tories as the party of Leave. But the problem goes deeper than that. The life experiences that make people into conservatives in the first place—starting careers, getting married, having children, buying houses and saving for retirement—are either disappearing or being delayed until much later in life. The gig economy is eating away at stable careers. Almost half of the country’s children are born outside marriage. Houses cost seven times annual income, compared with three times a generation ago. Pensions are becoming less generous. Younger professionals are attracted to Corbynism not just because they are idealists. They do not have a stake in the system the Conservatives seek to conserve.

Of the Tory camps, it is the New Dealers who have the best chance of dealing with this deeper issue. But they have to get through Brexit first. Britain appears to be heading for a chaotic autumn of paralysis and panic. It is quite possible that the government will fall and that Mr Corbyn will go into the resultant election campaign as favourite. Britain might have a second referendum that would provide a chance of reversing Brexit, but would also quite probably polarise the country yet further. In either case Mrs May might be deposed. Or she might leave willingly after whatever happens on March 29th. George Freeman, a former head of her policy board, says that at that point the party will badly need a leader who is “liberated from the poisonous politics of the referendum and the ‘shambles’ that followed.”

There are a number of potential leaders including cabinet members, such as Mr Javid and Jeremy Hunt, and some who have not yet attained such heights. Ms Davidson has ruled out running for the leadership on the grounds that it would take too heavy a toll on her emotional and personal life, but politics is full of strange reversals. But there is also Mr Johnson, who uses his column in the Daily Telegraph as a platform for his long-nourished leadership ambitions. He is not popular in the parliamentary party, and younger members think his generation’s day is done (he was at school with Mr Cameron); but though MPs winnow the candidates, Conservative leadership elections are, in the end, decided by the members, not the MPs, and among them Mr Johnson seems popular.

A bad Brexit, buyer’s remorse among Leave voters and Mr Johnson as leader could both strip the party of much of its residual strength and exacerbate its weaknesses enough to plunge it into true crisis. If it can keep its head, though, and bring off a Brexit that does not plunge the country into chaos or paupery, then its long habit of exercising power, its ruthlessness with its leaders and its ability to mix firmness with flexibility—qualities which have made the Conservative Party the democratic world’s most successful political machine—may yet see it through. And the intellectual skills of a rising generation—not something it has always been able to count on—may, if exercised to the full, allow not mere survival, but success.

Britain’s biggest post-war political fiasco prior to Brexit was the Suez Crisis of 1956, the unforced error of a Conservative government. In 1959, with a new leader, the party was returned to power with an increased majority.