The Conservative Party is slouching towards oblivion

This weekend, the Conservative Party is going through the motions of holding an annual conference.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Its leader makes grand statements of important policy changes, on net zero and human rights law, as if these will move the political market.

Kemi Badenoch continues to raise significant sums of money from donors, but they are propping up a Potemkin party that will cease to exist within four years. The 119 Tory MPs keep themselves busy with shadow ministerial posts, but they all know that it is over.

Even more unrealistically, some of them are plotting to replace Badenoch with Robert Jenrick, the moment that the rules allow it after her first year expires next month.

Is this what it was like for the Liberal Party 100 years ago, before Labour formed a minority government in 1924, having overtaken the Liberals in the number of seats won in the elections of 1922 and 1923? Asquith allowed Ramsay MacDonald to take office in the hope that the pressure of government would destroy the Labour Party; instead, it allowed Labour to establish itself as the main alternative to the Tories. The Liberals were decisively relegated to third-party status at the following election, in which Asquith lost his seat.