It is hard to fathom right now but the British Conservative Party is the most successful political party in democratic history. It has been ideologically nimble enough to navigate two centuries of change and govern Britain for almost two-thirds of that time, but steadfast enough in defense of its core values that it can claim a unique status in the endeavor of preserving of Western civilization, with leaders of statuesque authority—Robert Peel,
Benjamin Disraeli,
Winston Churchill,
Margaret Thatcher—to bear witness to its historic greatness.
So the spectacle in London over the last few months summons bewilderment and demands an explanation. The party that won world wars and faced down revolutionary ideologies, the people who kept alive the flame of freedom in some of its darkest moments, has been transformed into a parodic model of misrule, a ballet of buffoonery, its so-called leaders performing a bad slapstick in which the characters are locked forever in a futile struggle to escape from a revolving door.
This descent may have reached its nadir last week with the tragicomic collapse of the government of the shortest-serving prime minister in the country’s history, a woman so manifestly out of her depth, a politician with ambition so far exceeding her meager ability, that she couldn’t even outlast a lettuce.
It’s easy to laugh at Liz Truss, a name destined to be the answer to the trivia question everyone forgets. But she represents only the most extreme symptom of the underlying unseriousness that defines a once-great political institution.
How bad is it? A party that one month ago announced its commitment to restoring economic growth through deficit-risking tax cuts is now preparing to impose a new era of austerity with tens of billions of dollars worth of tax increases and deficit reductions.
Three months ago,
Jeremy Hunt,
a perennial also-ran in the party’s upper ranks, finished eighth out of eight candidates in the race to become prime minister. Now he is the man supposedly tasked with rescuing Britain from the costs of Ms. Truss’s failed fiscal experiment.
Then there was
Deemed unfit for office and dumped three months ago by his fellow Conservative members of Parliament, he came close to being…
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