What is the point of Boris Johnson’s Tory party?

It was way back in 2003 that the journalist Peter Hitchens first declared the Conservative party to be ‘useless’. Peter’s thesis was that the Tories had become incapable of fighting effectively for any significant conservative cause, and were in any case usually unwilling even to try and therefore should be disbanded. In a series of columns over several years embracing issues from the EU to mass immigration to law and order and cultural matters too (they certainly repay reading again) he sustained what was at the time a lonely barrage on the right. 

His thinking certainly greatly influenced my own decision to join forces with Nigel Farage and Ukip while actively campaigning for UK withdrawal from the EU from 2010 onwards. And as we contemplate the banishing of the lyrics of Rule Britannia and Land Of Hope And Glory from the Last Night of the Proms, the relegation of the statue of Hans Sloane at the British Museum and the general advance of extreme ‘woke’ identity politics through our public institutions, the Hitchens Thesis comes to the fore again.