Letters: what Biden and Ronaldo have in common

True conservatism

Sir: Douglas Murray claims that the Conservative party ‘will need to have some people who are actually right-wing’ (‘The Tories only have themselves to blame’, 6 July). Why? Its name isn’t ‘the right-wing party’. It has no foundational obligation to be right-wing for the sake of it. Rather its mission is to be conservative, and the people who now identify as ‘right-wing’ seem to have no interest in conserving anything, whether it’s our countryside, rivers, values, place on the international stage, parliamentary system, cultural institutions, national life expectancy, economic stability – or anything other than their own positions and status, which many have lost regardless. I’m sure many people who voted for other parties in the election would be sympathetic to a truly conservative agenda that promised to hang on to or restore what is good about Britain, but that is not offered by the current right, whose instinct is constantly to modernise, streamline, strip away, use up, sell off.