John Stuart Mill famously called the Tories the stupid party and a hundred years later AJP Taylor glossed this by saying that the

John Stuart Mill famously called the Tories “the stupid party”, and a hundred years later AJP Taylor glossed this by saying that the phrase was not unfair: “To be stupid and to be sensible are not far apart. But this is hard for the Tories, whose 1987 Drugs Act (as Enoch Powell was almost alone in pointing out at the time) introduced this iniquitous procedure, and who later gave us Michael Howard’s Police Bill, which only needed “State” inserted between its two wordsA principled opposition would offer a sustained critique of all that is undemocratic and authoritarian about the European Union, which is to say an awful lot. But it is their great problem, for all the absurd ballot, and it is a problem they will have to resolve before they can become electable again.It might be thought strange that this is the work of men who aren’t at all stupid. But that would require a position of intelligent, authentic scepticism; and the term “Eurosceptic” has been appropriated by people who aren’t sceptics at all in the proper sense, but are narrow dogmatists or even fanatics.The Tories’ internal feud over Europe has now reached a point of exhaustion, for them and certainly for the rest of us. But then this is a consequence of a policy begun by the Tories.A principled opposition would denounce Jack Straw’s grotesque totalitarian proposal to confiscate the assets of men convicted of no crime. And the Tories are in any case hamstrung by their own record in government.A principled opposition might criticise an Ulster “settlement” in which murderers are being released from prison without any decommissioning whatever of terrorist weaponry, and in which Gerry Adams will very likely soon be drawing a salary from the Crown and taxpayer as a member of the Northern Ireland Executive while he remains a member of the IRA Army Council.

It is difficult for a Tory opposition to come to terms with a Labour home secretary reminiscent of the Tsarist minister of the interior of whom it was said that the only thing further to the right of him was the wall. It’s true that the Tories have known similar debacles before – in 1906, they won all of 157 seats to the Liberals’ 400, in 1945, 213 to Labour’s 393 – and subsequently recovered to regain power. It’s also true that the Tory party has before now tried to tear itself apart, over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, over tariff reform in the 1900s.But today the Tories’ task is all the harder because of the nature of Tony Blair’s success. Disraeli wrote of sound Tory government meaning “Tory men and Whig measures”; Blairism often looks like Labour people and Tory measures. They are suffering from a death wish produced by a nervous breakdown brought on by an identity crisis.

This is a party which doesn’t know what it is or whether it likes itself. Like so many individual people at some stage of their lives, the Tory party is oppressed by the sheer futility of its existence.Any party might be forgiven a period of self-doubt after an electoral defeat as crushing as the Conservatives suffered 17 months ago. William Hague’s policy statement excluding British membership of the single European currency for this parliament and the next may be shorter but, for all that the Tory leader has certainly secured an appropriately Stalinist majority in his euro- ballot, the mood of the Tories as they meet at Bournemouth is suicidally self-destructive. A detached observer unacquainted with the Venetian intrigues and tribal hatreds within the Conservative and Unionist party might wonder what the point of Mr Hague’s quaint stunt was. John Major’s maligned “wait and see” policy looks wiser all the time, and has been paid the sincerest form of flattery by Tony Blair.
But that detached observer wouldn’t realise that the Tories are now a party in deep psychic trouble.

IN Gerald Kaufman’s famous phrase, the 1983 Labour election manifesto was the longest suicide note in history. No system exists to create an aggregated picture of hedge fund dealings around the world. But the big banks who have lent so wildly to LTCM and others all come under national systems of banking supervision and in most cases enjoy implied central bank guarantees for their depositors’ funds: a British high street bank, for example, could never be allowed to fail. Those banks should be told immediately to limit new exposures to hedge funds, and to report them in detail. And central banks should willingly share the information, so that they can pinpoint trouble spots ahead.Gordon Brown may be keen to go grandstanding in Washington with his blueprint for a global regulator, but he would be better closeted at home with the Governor of the Bank of England, making sure that the City’s hatches are tightly battened down against the coming storm. We know by now that banks can rarely be trusted to act in the best interests of the economy as a whole: in the present crisis, it is up to governments to see that they stay afloat and under control..