“Leadership elections are intended to expose the ideas of rival candidates - thus making it possible for the party to decide the direction in which it wants to be led.  The Tory party is being denied that opportunity.  That is, I suspect, because none of the leadership candidates has the faintest idea about what Conservatism now stands for.  Meanwhile their supporters are engaged in no more than a doomed search for a “winner” who does not exist.”

Roy Hattersley, his tap dripping less bile than usual in today’s Guardian.

To which, no doubt, spirited Tories will counter that “if a week is a long time in politics four years is a hell of a lot longer.”  Or perhaps “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose ‘em.”  That is the self-calming fatalism which passes for electoral wisdom on the right today.

It is never welcome when your enemies understand you better than you do yourself.  But Hattersley is completely correct.  The issue confronting Conservatives is more existential than electoral.

The Party should understand this at some level.  But if it does it doesn’t show.  When one looks upon the forces duelling now for the leadership – the newest incarnations of “relevancy” in the form of the well-heeled Notting Hill Set on one side and the self-made meritocrats on the other – one’s heart sinks.  It is all too clear that Conservatism will continue to be bastardised for power, as it has been by generations of hungry men, while Davis tries and fails in 2012, and then again while Cameron, Gove, Swire and Co take their turn in 2016.

The search for political apparel acceptable to a majority of the electorate remains the sole preoccupation of the Party.  But twenty different ways to say the “British people” must be freed from big government, keep more of their own money and yet suffer Labour’s public sector sacred cows does not a governing Party make … not in the 21st Century and not on the right.

I don’t doubt that the Party has a long way to fall yet before it discovers that freedom and prosperity are only products of good Conservatism, not Conservatism itself.  The turning point, if there is to be one, will come when the evidence of chronic instability in our society is too ubiquitous and too powerful to ignore.  So far it hasn’t got that awful for enough of us.

The generation of minds which might critique liberalism itself and energise the Conservative Party thereby are probably yet callow … and perhaps still to be sown with the seed of rebellion against Labour’s marxism-lite, against the sundering of society by multiracialism and against the decline of the West.  But if that indeed happens there could be a generation of Neo-Tories ... men and women by no means satisfied with mere economism and electoral expediency, and seeking instead to represent once again the true interests in the country.

If they do not arise, of course, or if they fail, the Conservative torch will simply be passed out of the right hand.