The Conservative Party’s almost total loss of its historical tradition is the principal reason for its current plight
20 OCTOBER 2022 IS A DATE I SHALL NOT FORGET. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day when I was to lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest on “British Conservatism post-Boris Johnson”.
If I had stuck to my original title, my lecture — on the future of a Party which seems to have decided that it doesn’t want one — would have been almost as short as Liz Truss’s statement. Instead, I decided to take refuge in its past.
Invoking Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva flies only
