‘Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?’ asked C.P. Cavafy in his poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’:
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
All through your and my life the Labour party have been at the gates of Downing Street, and often enough stormed them, only to be beaten back at a subsequent election. What might happen to the Conservative party if those barbarians disappear?
We must not assume that Jeremy Corbyn will take the Labour leadership. The likelihood remains that when second preferences are counted Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham will scrape through. But theirs would be a miserable victory: humiliated before they even begin. Their party now faces one of two alternatives: a real victory for Mr Corbyn, or a Pyrrhic victory for Ms Cooper or Mr Burnham. The voting begins next Friday, 14 August. Burnham says the Labour party may split and I do not doubt him.
Tories will at first rejoice. The barbarians are fighting among themselves and no longer threaten us! Hurrah! And it is true that a Labour civil war or even disintegration would guarantee the Conservatives’ return to office in 2020. Shall I, then, live (d.v.) under a Tory prime minister until I’m at least 75?
There are reasons to doubt it. At our peril do we underestimate the way Labour’s shadow lurking in the wings has bound Conservatives together. No internal gravitational pull by any one uniting ideal keeps our always-troubled Tory marriage alive: it’s fear of what lies outside our walls that achieves this.
When, aged 20, I arrived at Cambridge in 1969, I did not join the university Conservative association.
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