“None of the candidates has yet to articulate any sense of how he would mould and lead a genuinely changed Conservative Party.  Every time the candidates attack Blair and Brown, the staple of nearly all their speeches, they confirm Labour’s dominance of the landscape, and expose their inability to do what Tony and Gordon did — take arguments about their own party back to basics and build a coherent long-term strategy to change party and country.  It sounds easy.  It wasn’t.  Not one of the Tories on offer understands the nature of what was required by Labour then, and by them now.”

Alasdair Cambell, writing in The Times about the six Tory leadership hopefuls.

Three of them - Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Dr Liam Fox and David Willetts - he writes off as plainly not leadership material.  I agree (and so, please God, will they very soon).  The remaining three - Kenneth Clarke, David Davis and David Cameron - he writes off as plainly incapable of defeating Labour at the polls.  I agree.

He does not stoop to saying so in The Times - no longer The Thunderer but still not an obvious organ of liberalism - but Campbell could just as confidently write off anyone the Tories put up as leader.  The barriers standing between the Conservatives and revival are no longer merely electoral, merely a matter of political calculation and slick persuasion.  When last month, at the memorial for the victims of 7/7, Ken Livingstone said of London, “The city will survive - it is the future of our world,” he wasn’t mouthing liberal pieties.  He meant that what London is, “our world” or England - and possibly Scotland and Wales – shall be.  When David Blunkett, as Home Secretary, informed Parliament that there was “no upper limit on immigration” he wasn’t speaking theoretically.  He meant that the sovereignty of the English did not hold over England.

The left’s “modernising” Project is a racial, cultural and sexual revolution, the purpose of which is to re-make us through law-enforced cultural equality into a land free of white racism, male sexism and homophobia.

Yes, to us and to most normal, healthy people this ambition is vile and, frankly, a bad joke.  Human nature cannot be abolished and nor can an Englishman’s desire to possess his own homeland.  But the modern left cleaves to ideology in place of Nature and nation.  In power it goes where its ideology decrees, and since the 1980’s the direction has been singularly culturally Marxist - even if Conservatives haven’t really woken up to the fact and are still fretting about personal freedom and economics.

One can, I think, perfectly fairly flesh out Campbell’s statement to the effect that a Conservative Party which can only make a song and dance about the waste of Big Government and offer the voter lower taxes ‘n more choice is politically incompetent and spiritually bankrupt.  It will be forever powerless to oppose the dynamic of change from the left even if, by some astounding twist of fate, it should get back into government.  One can rely on the Conservatives for one thing and one thing only: on the day we all die of liberalism they will still be brandishing their ironic little torch of freedom.

All six Tory candidates would vigorously disagree, of course.  They would consider that their principles are fine and universal ... philosophical truths which good men hold dear and found their lives upon.  Good men come in all colours – something any modern Conservative, never mind a leadership candidate, must absolutely declaim to the skies.  Often.

What was that you said?  The dispossesion of the urban English working-class?  Ah, sorry … not an issue we need trouble ourselves with any longer.  We have put that sort of thing well behind us.  And so should the urban English working-class.

And what was that?  The eternal consequences of English girls Africanising their family lines every damned night of the week?  Twice.  No, no, can’t go there, I’m afraid.  Absolutely not.  Anyway, individuals trump groups, don’tcha know?

For the modern Conservative, universal principles have lead to the principle of universalism.  Because they lacked the intelligence to kill off Campbell and the cultural left at birth, when they had the chance, they have had to teeter culturally leftward in case some lying little toad accused them of being pro-English.  Finally, it has come to the point where not only intelligence but real courage is required to face down their foes.  And they don’t have it.  Not one of their would-be leaders has it.  Campbell knows it.  The left knows it.  Only the Conservatives have not noticed that they are, as Campbell so charmingly puts it, “Forgotten but not gone.”

So what will become of the forgotten Party of Freedom and its eventual new leader.  Well, the future might well be remarkably similar to the past: spiritual bankruptcy and humiliation papered over with determined efforts to be relevant and to appeal to the centre ground.

The Conservatives’ most earnest and touching belief – that if they are “relevant” and “appeal to the centre ground” they can still win their share of elections and imprint their politics on the people thereby – is almost certainly wrong now and will be “wronger” tomorrow.

Yes, Campbell speaks of the task facing the eventual new Conservative leader of taking the Party to the centre. That, of course, is standard electoral wisdom in a two-party, FPTP system (very few constituencies produce three-party contests).  You get everyone to the right/left of you anyway.  You have to fight for the tipping point in the centre.

But New Labour has it easy in that regard because of the perpetual leftward migration of the zeitgeist.  The Tories have to chase it, and - for me anyway - it is no longer worth the effort.  The big wheel of the zeitgeist will just keep rolling on, blindly re-casting the pursuit of liberalism into ever more harmful, anti-Nature, anti-English forms.  And through them, the nation will dissolve into … what?  Babylon?  A liberal paradise of a hundred peoples and cultures with an electorate that Conservatives have no means of addressing?  Is that what the Party is chasing after with its famous relevance and centrism?

There is, in fact, only one justification now for Conservative relevance and centrism.  And Campbell is correct.  The Party must follow Labour in its path to power.

Blair, Mandelson, Brown and Campbell clothed themselves in the golden remnants of the centre ground in 1997 although they were culturally Marxist at heart and intended from the outset a Project for the country every bit as much as the Project for the Party.

Just so.  Let the right play this double game.  The template is: one project of Party centrism and another, buried in the golden folds of the garment, of national salvation … reclamation, indeed.  But for that, Conservatives will have to start thinking as they have not thought since Airey Neave and Keith Joseph manipulated Margaret Thatcher into the Party leadership.  Who are the Conservatives and who are we, the people?  What is the Party really for: universal principles or people?

Two centuries ago Conservatives opposed equality and universal suffrage because they knew these things were destructive of the nation.  In all this while nothing has changed.  If it is not time to solve the riddle of modernity now, with the dispossession of the English people mere decades away, it never will be.