The joint One Nation Caucus and Tory Reform Group conference last weekend, following the recent National Conservative Conference, are pointers to the shape of a possible future.
We might not rejoin, but the political momentum is now with those seeking a closer relationship. From a Brexiteer perspective, Johnson is sounding rather complacent.
ConservativeHome’s snapshot retrospective on the shortest premiership in British political history – one year on and day by day.
The number of possibilities teaches us three lessons about politics today. Firstly, never to underestimate the role played by mere chance. Secondly, that this is not an age of great leaders who make their own luck. And, thirdly, that we need to choose more carefully in future.
Maybe the future isn’t Leavers v Remainers, or even Conservative v Labour. Perhaps its truth v post-truth – Rowling v Dorries. I’m with Rowling. You?
His university-educated opponents will view him as a relic of the past. I see his refusal to stay on message as the shape of things to come.
The intellectual heft of figures like him will be vital in ensuring that it moves forward, rather than languishing in the same ideological dead-ends that sunk it in the first place.
Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have been confronted by the reality of how voters respond to being asked to pay for green policies.
One should not be shy of admitting that any major short-term gains from our accession are primarily political. We already have trade agreements with nine of the current eleven members.
The A list and its successors haven’t kept a golden generation out of Parliament. Many of those who might have made it up aren’t putting themselves forward for selection in the first place.
But over two in five members don’t – and his support has fallen since our last survey was held just over a month ago.
In the same interview he said “I tend to be rather bad at politics”, which is true if one takes the holding of great offices of state as the yardstick of success.
Above all, they shouldn’t become preoccupied with Woke to the exclusion of everything else. This is the trap that many Labour backbenchers and much of the Left is falling into.
His life and works appears to have little influence at the top of the current Conservative Party, and among the wider membership and the British public. But it seems that in those countries where Scruton went behind the Iron Curtain, his work and life is not just remembered, he is still actively saving minds.