As Kemi Badenoch takes control of the Conservatives and tries to somehow restore their credibility and coherence, one thought remains inescapable: that trying to make sense of the Tory party can be a fast route to a migrainous headache.

Badenoch is the sixth Conservative leader in only eight years. From the Brexit referendum onwards, her party’s default setting has been all about division, mishap and scandal. Floating above the enduring mess are two spectral gods who seem to lead their worshippers down no end of blind alleys: that grim British nativist Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher, whose free-market credo still forms the core of most Tories’ beliefs. More centrist past figures are never mentioned: one of the party’s few concrete certainties, in fact, is that its old one nation element is now all but dead and buried, killed by the forces that have pushed Conservatism squarely into the realms of the radical right.

A Toryism wary of ideology, cool in its collective temperament and wedded to established institutions – think of, say, Harold Macmillan, and his party’s domination of the 1950s – seems like something from a galaxy far, far away. The party is now full of flailing anger – focused on, among other targets, its own 14 years in office. There is a lot of support in Tory circles for Donald Trump. Even if many Conservative MPs want to concentrate on the comparatively small politics of UK living standards, jobs and tax rates, the wider Tory family – which goes beyond the party, into GB News, the Mail and Telegraph, and loud voices online – would sooner fixate on an ever-wilder array of enemies: Islam, multiculturalism, “woke” universities, the civil service, “identity politics”, the heretical National Trust.

The result is a remarkable........

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