[denphone]

Not my words but the words of Bagehot (Adrian Wooldridge ) in his column in the Economist (paywall).

https://www.economist.com/britain/20...f-conservatism

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-politics-live

There are lots of reasons why the party of government has become the party of anarchy ... But one thing above all others explains the current mess: the Conservative party, or large chunks of it, has forgotten the basic principles of conservatism. It has ceased to think like a conservative party, and it won’t recover its governing ability until it relearns that difficult art.

The first principle of conservatism is to be sceptical of pie-in-the-sky schemes. John Stuart Mill liked to mock Tories as “the stupid party”. Walter Bagehot replied that stupidity was a virtue rather than a vice — the Tories succeeded precisely because they preferred common sense to “remote ideas”, and pragmatic compromise to ideological principles. Butler summed up the Conservative approach to politics when he described politics as “the art of the possible”. Michael Oakeshott, a philosopher, said that to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.”

The Brexit wing of the Conservative party is the party of pie in the sky. It has reversed every one of Oakeshott’s phrases. Britain has been a member of the European Union for 45 years and was the leading architect of the single market. But the Brexiteers have decided to dump half a century of history, bought at the cost of hard negotiation and compromise, in favour of airy talk of “sovereignty” and “control”. They sold Brexit to the British people without specifying what it might mean, making Utopian promises about having cake and eating it while making effortless trade deals hither and yon.