Boris Johnson has made a nonsense of the Conservative party

In a judgment that will ring down the centuries, the Supreme Court unanimously finds that a Conservative prime minister had unlawfully suspended Parliament, and press ganged the Queen into being his accomplice.

A Conservative prime minister, I should emphasise: the leader of a party that once lectured us on the need to defend the British constitution and rule of law from socialist extremists. Now it is reduced to being led by a jobbing journo, whose word few have believed since the early 1990s, and a thuggish clique of advisers, of the type who give student politics a bad name. They have driven genuine conservatives from their own party, and possibly millions of voters with them. The caution of Philip Hammond, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames and Dominic Grieve, may not be to the taste of the Maoists of the right. But they are the kind of politicians small ‘c’ conservatives once supported on the boring but nevertheless compelling grounds that ‘at least they won’t wreck the country’.