When the Tories reach the very bottom of their bad ideas barrel, they come up with a dead rat plan for conscription. The notion is so decrepit that those old Sir Bufton Tuftons who used to rise in the Commons to declare national service had made them the fine men they were today are long retired and mostly dead, six decades after conscription ended in the UK. It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash! “Toughen up teenagers,” declared the unlikely defence secretary, Grant Shapps. If Tory campaign managers still need to secure their over-80s core vote, they really are in trouble.

This dying gasp is the exemplar of their 14 years of governing. Everything has been performative – all about announcements, not reality, and moving on before anyone queries outcomes or value for money. National service swept all the Tory front pages: job done. Marching 18-year-olds into a compulsory year of service marks Tory high command’s final abandonment of younger voters. They and their media inhabit the oldie planet of the ancients, every year limping further away from modern life on earth. David Cameron’s legacy project, the National Citizen Service, had its funding cut by two-thirds after attracting a fraction of its expected participants despite devouring 95% of all the youth service funding.

Conscription ended in 1960, too expensive to accommodate the reluctant doing nothing useful, and even rejected by some on the right such as Milton Friedman. But the army has missed its recruitment and retention targets for the past five years, perhaps partly thanks to recent revelations about treatment of recruits: 267 army training centre instructors were charged with abuse and assault between 2015 and 2023; civilian police........

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