Stranger things.

Douglas Murray says, "But the fact that a party like Reform – with almost no household names on its list – could be so close to the Conservative party in the polls is itself a sign. If you add together the Reform and Conservative parties’ share of the vote, you have a force that would at least have a chance of power."

This just isn't correct. Reform will underperform and score zero MPs, while Labour's lead will shrink closer to the election because that's just what happens. The best case scenario for this Tory party is a hung parliament. 

He goes on to say "But the Conservative party never seems to want those people; indeed it is one of the few political parties I know whose leader seems to rather dislike its own voters".

It's more fundamental than that. It dislikes conservatism. Conservatism is popular so they mistake it for populism, and something to be socially distanced from, because they believe (for reasons that escape me) that the party has swung too far to the right.

He concludes by saying: "After the catastrophe, I suggest a rethink. The Conservative party always says it is a broad church but it isn’t. [...] Perhaps after the election, when we become the only country in the world to vote in a left-wing government, the Conservatives might wonder whether they shouldn’t have made more friends on their own side. The left does – which is just one reason why it is going to win."

Except that the Tory party very much is a broad church. It will take literally anyone but conservatives. We have radical free marketeer libertarians, liberal internationalists, Tory socialists and a smattering of full-blown wokesters. I can count on one hand the number of actual conservatives, because the meaning of the word conservative has become so badly corrupted, that very few people know what it actually means. Thus, the right does not have a unity problem. It has a definition problem.

The answer, then, is not to bury its differences. That's how it came to be in the mess to begin with. It last came to power with a massive majority, but no unity of purpose and no plan, because the party doesn't stand for anything, and immediately breaks out into infighting the moment it tries to do anything. 

The task at hand, is to properly define what the right stands for, what it seeks to achieve, and build a movement around that, which naturally excludes the one nation wets, fanatical free marketeers, and the liberal internationalist dinosaurs. 

The right keeps showing us that if it finds the right "leadership" it can win referendums and elections, but without having a clue what to do with power when it wins, it accomplishes nothing and disintegrates almost immediately, and only after the fact do they realise that maybe they should have had a plan. i.e Reversing Blair's constitutional vandalism, delivering cheap energy and fixing immigration. 

Until the right fixes its fundamental definition problem, it won't actually matter if we do win elections, because nothing will be accomplished by it. There is no unity without purpose, just a temporary, tactical ceasefire for short term aims. And look where that got us.

(The background phot features the late and great Felix Dennis - maverick publisher (The Week and many others) and hedonist tree-fancier. A forthright capitalist and terrible loss to the eclectic rich population of the UK, with no time for smug elites; we just know he would have been up for helping WOTE to make its mark and stick it to the Establishment.)