For years Britain’s ruling Conservative Party has been troubled by nightmare visions of its own destruction in what it calls “Canadian Territory.”

That disaster scenario came roaring through the night at the Tories and their hapless caretaker leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, on Sunday as the results of the election for the European Parliament were announced.

The Conservatives had their worst showing in any national election since the party was founded in 1834. They got only 9 per cent of the popular vote and won only four of the 73 seats Britain has in the 751-seat European Parliament.

The Tories were trounced by their bête noire, Nigel Farage. His newly-formed Brexit Party, dedicating to seeing through the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, for which British voters opted in a 2016 referendum, be completed without delay.

With his one-issue campaign and simple message that parliament must honour the referendum result, Farage and his new alliance won nearly 32 per cent of the vote and 29 seats in the European Parliament.

The looming terror now for the Tories and whoever succeeds May as leader by the end of July is that Farage may launch his Brexit Party into domestic British politics.

He lured several senior Tories into running for the Brexit Party in the European elections. So there might well be a rush to join his ranks from among Conservatives who are avid for Britain to leave the EU by the current deadline of October 31, especially if parliament continues to put conditions and barriers in the way of the exodus.

With only an insecure minority government, a new election always a possibility and the campaign to replace May already well under way, the Tories are now confronting the same fate as Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1993.

Voter disenchantment after almost 10 years of PC government led by Brian Mulroney left the Tories with only two of the 295 House of Commons seats after the 1993 election.

The party, as Progressive Conservatives, has never recovered. In the following years it was unable to resist the takeover, on unfavourable terms, by the radical right Reform Alliance and the creation of the modern Conservative Party.

Many British Tories look at the Canadian Conservative Party today and see a less centrist, more bitter and mean-spirited formation that the old Progressive Conservative Party (though few of them understand the uniquely Canadian concept of the Red Tory) and shudder at the prospect of them same thing happening to them.

Ironically, it was also in 1993, with the founding of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which was taken over by Farage in 1997, that the Tories began to feel the cold wind of extinction on their necks.

Farage and UKIP were very successful in persuading large numbers of British voters, especially nationalist Tories and Labour Party-supporting blue-collar workers in defunct industries, that membership in the EU was eroding British sovereignty and immigrants from Europe were stealing British jobs.

The hysterical fear among some Conservatives of being throttled from the right by the UKIP legions pushed then party leader and prime minister, David Cameron, to call the Brexit referendum in mid 2016.

Cameron didn’t believe a majority of British voters would decide to leave the EU after joining in 1973.

He was wrong, though the margin of 52 per cent in favour of leaving and 48 per cent remaining was far from conclusive.

Farage, his work done and unhappy about the increasing influence of neo-Nazis in UKIP, hung up his spurs. But he has been drawn back on to the stage with his new party, both by the failure of parliament to complete Brexit and because many polls now suggest British voters have had second thoughts. The proportions in the 2016 referendum are now reversed and the majority support staying in the EU.

The last three years have been chaos as Cameron’s successor, May, has tried to negotiate an agreement with Brussels about the future relationship between the EU and Britain that is also acceptable to the British Parliament. She has failed and, last week, tearfully announced her resignation next month, though she will remain prime minister until the Tories produce a new leader in July.

The half dozen candidates who have already stepped up to succeed May fall into two general groups. There are those who think a new deal with Brussels that is also acceptable to Parliament can be had by better negotiating techniques. And there are those, like current front-runner Boris Johnson, the former foreign minister and mayor of London, who advocate getting out of the EU by the October 31 deadline even without a deal and in the full knowledge this will cause economic and social mayhem.

It is Johnson and the other hardline anti-EU Tories who most fear Farage and his Brexit Party becoming the new face of conservatism in British politics.

They may well be right that they will suffer the same fate at Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party and be swallowed by less appetizing right-wing factions.

But for the moment, they would do well to look more closely at the overall results of the European Parliamentary election in Britain.

Farage’s Brexit Party did indeed make a revolutionary entry on to the British political stage. But when taken together, parties advocating British departure from the EU won 35 per cent of the vote. Parties dedicated to Britain remaining a member of the EU won 40.5 per cent.

This will undoubtedly encourage those in the Labour Party, among the Liberals, in the Scottish National Party, the Greens and, indeed, anti-Brexit Tories, to press for another referendum. The new Tory leader, especially if it is Johnson or someone else from the pro-Brexit camp, is unlikely to agree to that.

But this is a minority government and can fall at any time. Anything can happen in the coming weeks and months, and it is still by no means certain Britain will leave the EU by October 31.

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