I have just seen Daniel Hannan’s Daily Telegraph article of 31 May 2025. If this is a late reply, it hardly matters. So far as I can tell, he turns out this political sludge about once a week, and its message never changes. Here, he mourns the growing disinclination of the English ever to vote Conservative again, while hoping all it not as awful as it appears. You can summarise his message in this quote:

In the end, the Conservatives can come back only by playing to their old strengths: sound money, balanced budgets, sustainable growth, economic aspiration.

The article is the equivalent of trying to reanimate a corpse by whispering spells. Worse still, it is not the corpse of a once-great man, but of a bloated middle manager who expired at a buffet. The idea that the Conservative Party can be saved by “playing to its old strengths” is not merely mistaken—it is delusional. There are no old strengths. There never were.

When did the Conservatives last balance a budget? Was it before or after they presided over the largest peacetime deficits in history? When did they maintain sound money? Was it when they debased the currency to finance lockdowns, inflated the housing market to keep the suburbs docile, or underwrote the permanent welfare state by selling indexed debt to pension funds? Was “sustainable growth” achieved via mass immigration, financialisation, or gimmicks like Help to Buy and 95% mortgages for people with 0% productivity?

The only strength the Conservatives have retained is the ability to lie about their record while pointing to a Labour government they prepared for and installed. These are not old strengths. They are old slogans. And the electorate, as ruined as it is, is no longer fooled.

Or take this:

In these pages last month, the former Conservative and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell offered a considered plan to deal with immigration, including letting the Lord Chancellor fire activist judges.

Here, Hannan touches on something real—the poisonous activism of our judiciary—but ruins the point by proposing its own destruction as the solution. Yes, the judges are activist trash, and most were appointed under Conservative governments, and have spent their time of the bench undermining law, sovereignty, and even grammar. But giving the Lord Chancellor the power to sack judges is not a solution. It is an invitation to constitutional tyranny. Once you abolish judicial tenure, you will not get reactionary hangmen in robes. You will get even more loyal regime operatives, reading Guardian editorials from the bench and jailing people for misgendering.

The only judges who will be removed are those who, despite the vetting, show some quaint attachment to English liberties. The rest—the race hustlers, the Stonewall commissars, the ones who define “cruelty” as deportation and “justice” as compulsory trans pronouns—will be promoted. We do not need more discretion in the hands of ministers. We need fewer judges, fewer courts, and fewer laws for them to enforce.

Or take this:

Does Badenoch, I wonder, feel the spectral weight of her predecessors’ expectations? Is she haunted by Churchill’s shade, his bellicose jaw set in disapproval?

And here the article tumbles into open farce. We are asked to believe that the ghosts of Churchill and Disraeli are stirring in disapproval at the fate of their party. It is difficult to know where to begin. Churchill’s “shade” should be exorcised, not conjured. He was not a prophet or a saviour. He was a drunken grifter, a serial warmonger, a man whose principal contribution to the twentieth century was turning Britain from a global empire into an American dependency. He bankrupted the country to fight a war he had no plan to win. He did none of this from principle, but to rake in enough bribes to pay off his debts. His speeches bequeathed us reams of lying prose and a ruined civilisation. One of the greatest misfortunes in modern history was that the Fuzzy-Wuzzies at Omdurman didn’t get a spear into his belly. He had all the vanity of Napoleon, with none of the victories. No one who thinks him worth praising counts as a conservative.

Or here is this:

The key to electoral success is seriousness… voters will be keener by then to have adults in charge – serious types who can say no to pressure groups, take unpopular decisions and restore order to our finances.

Oh, give it a miss! Let us look at Conservative politicians not as Mr Hannan tells us they are, but as both he and I know they are. These are people who made their way by sycophancy and connections. How many of them are not sexual perverts by nature? How many made themselves perverts from realising the surest way to preferment was to get on the watchlist of our own and several foreign security services? They turned their misshapen bodies to effect by putting on expensive suits and learning the surface mannerisms of the old governing class. Before 2024, they tricked their electors into voting for them by promising what they could not deliver, and never had any wish to deliver. Those who succeeded set about using their undeserved places to make as much money as they could stuff into their bank accounts. Before it backfired and Thermidor was called, the ruling class wanted national disintegration. It was given national disintegration by these Conservatives on a scale that would have shocked the minsters in the first Blair Government. If that is what adults do, give me Bryan Mercadente and his deathlists.

Or we have:

Toryism is not so much a political programme as the expression of certain attributes and instincts: level-headedness, patriotism, tradition, self-reliance, love of order, irony, detachment.

This is the final insult. Toryism, says Hannan, is not even a set of policies—it is a mood. A vibe. A certain English flavour. This would be easier to accept if the past fifty years had not shown us what Tory instincts actually are: betrayal, cowardice, sycophancy to foreign interests, and a pathological inability to conserve anything except the pension pots of their donors. What remains of “tradition” after the Tory Party? What “order” do they defend, except that of their own security details? What “patriotism” consists in the transfer of national assets to Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Chinese shell companies? Toryism has become a brand. Its essence is now cynicism without clarity, heritage without substance, nostalgia without memory.

Mr Hannan’s article is not the death rattle of a party. It is the purr of a eunuch fondling the waxwork of a dead sovereign. He writes of revivals, but cannot name a single honest Conservative achievement in living memory. He invokes ghosts, but forgets the ruins they left. He speaks of aspiration while standing ankle-deep in the excrement of a party that abandoned every principle and is now surprised to find itself friendless.

The Tories are not coming back. Not because they are hated. But because they are irrelevant. No one is moved by their slogans. No one believes their statistics. No one expects them to do anything except lose and write ghosted memoirs.

If anything is to be rebuilt, it will be built on a foundation of their cast-down grave markers.