Boris’s Tory assassins have learnt nothing from Thatcher’s downfall

John Stuart Mill once dismissed the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. When a reader queried the insult, Mill qualified it, but not by much. ‘I never meant to say that Conservatives are generally stupid,’ he wrote. ‘I meant that stupid people are generally Conservatives’. More than a century and a half later as the party implodes once again, today’s Tory MPs are still living up to Mill’s derogatory description.

Sitting securely with their huge parliamentary majority, and with at least two years to go before they need to face the voters again, the Tories are going all out to make sure that they lose. In doing so, they are not only condemning the country to a likely Lab/Lib/SNP coalition, but in all probability hastening the breakup of the United Kingdom. What is remotely ‘Conservative’ or sensible about such self-destructive lunacy?

Yet that is the prospect before us as the herd of Tory MPs accelerate their gallop towards the precipice.