Welsh Tories would be wise to split from the Conservatives

Conservatives in Wales are jumpy. Seeing Boris’s name as poisonous on the doorstep, a number of them have suggested disaffiliating from the national party and forming their own Welsh Conservatives as the party of the right west of Offa’s Dyke. Some in the central party in London are, perhaps unsurprisingly, aghast: one unnamed Tory MP has referred apocalyptically to the Balkanisation of the Conservatives. At least one very vociferously unionist Senedd member, James Evans, is also furious.

They should not be worried. Why? Because the break-up of the Tory party is actually rather a forward-looking idea, beneficial in the long term to Conservatism. CCHQ should welcome this plan with open arms.

For one thing, the union issue is a red herring. True, Tories both inside and outside Wales have, for good reason, always been the strongest opponents of the nativist pretensions of Plaid Cymru; but there is no inconsistency between a support for political union and a formal separation between their organisations on both sides of the border.