The trouble with the Tories is that voters think they’re from another planet

It is hardly unprecedented for rising Tories to fall out with their seniors, and vice versa. Before the war, Anthony Eden’s friends used to complain about the ‘Old Gang’ around Neville Chamberlain. The gangsters retaliated by sneering at the ‘Glamour Boys’. Now some of today’s glamour boys are said to be irritated with the ‘bed-blockers’: older MPs who prefer to serve on when they should be creating vacancies for brilliant youth. There is nothing unusual in any of that — but Tories of an earlier epoch would be bewildered by their successors’ eagerness to inflate every trivial dispute into a headline. Many of today’s Tories insist on approaching every problem with an open mouth.

This has led some commentators to wonder whether bed-blocking might be a graver matter than the Parliamentary tenacity of a handful of knights and dames. Could it be that the real bed-blocker is the Tory party itself? The most recent history of the Tories, by John Ramsden, is entitled An Appetite For Power.