Tories and Conservatism.

Peter Oborne gives a perfect example of the problem with the British Conservative Party:

Sir Patrick Cormack, a Conservative Party backbencher, invited me to his room. He wanted to ask what questions he should put to a government minister who would soon be giving evidence on Zimbabwe to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, of which he was a member.

So I told Cormack about a strange event that had occurred the previous month. President Mugabe had been invited to Paris by President Chirac for a summit meeting. This example of European approval of a barbarous dictator caused uproar.

When Downing Street was asked about the episode, it gave the impression to reporters that it had neither been consulted nor informed, while ministers spoke out angrily against the invitation.

In fact I was able to show Cormack evidence that the British government had known all along about the invitation, raised not the slightest objection, that its protestations of ignorance were false, and that the angry pronouncements by ministers were no better than a cynical device. I suggested to Cormack that he should expose this wretched business at the Foreign Affairs Committee, and offered to draft him a list of questions.

Sir Patrick gazed around his large and beautifully appointed Commons office. He looked appalled. "Oh, I could never do that," he stated. "It might embarrass the Government."

Even by the standards of a man who devotes a large amount of time to slagging off the Tories, DumbJon has outdone himself:

Both the Tories and the left have an interest in passing off the Tories as the antonym of Leftism: you either have the collectivist insanity of socialism, or you have the Tory Party, aka the Legion D'Entitled, the smug, sneering, snobbish collection of over-privileged degenerates, wasters and amoral weasels, looking down their nose at the ordinary, decent working people of this country. The only reason half these morons are even in the Tory Party in the first place is the lurking fear that if they joined Labour, they might have to sit next to a Scouser.

I can't emphasise enough how good it is to see the Tories' monopoly over the right-wing parts of the British electorate slipping away. May they never recover.