There’s an interesting conspiracy theory kicking around that the Tories wanted to lose the last election.

It’s either that, or they launched the worst political campaign in UK history headed by an unlikable establishment figure whose personality and policies sat completely at odds with rising conservative nostalgia.

Looking at the UK today, ‘losing on purpose’ is a reasonable assumption to make.

(I’ll add that elements of the Australian conservative movement appear to have no interest in winning an election. How else can you explain John Pesutto’s Opposition?)

The problems within British society are serious and their repair will involve hard decisions likely to upset chunks of the voting community. Someone is going to face political oblivion. Unlike Thatcher’s era, a significant number people involved in the unrest have no allegiance or love for Britain. They fly foreign flags and have no family connections to the wider British population. Many of them have no legal standing in the country at all. This lack of interconnection and groundwork of criminality is more problematic than politicians realise. There is no wider community to calm these mobs except religious authorities who, themselves, have a muddled history of harbouring separatists and dangerous extremists.

For 14 years, the Tories threw open the doors of the UK and established the two-tiered policing system that Labour presently enforces. Encouraged by the larger cultural shift to the left, the Tories made many mistakes and squandered their time in office.

No doubt the Tories heard the hatchlings of their terrible policies coming home to roost. The conspiracy theory goes that they ran out of options and sent Sunak outside with a sword to fall on.

Barely a month into the Keir Starmer reign, the streets are on fire and Parliament has been infested with disaster – each one of those policies nesting in the alcoves, dirtying the leather seats where freshly minted politicians wince at the decay.

Labour might be in power, but as a government, it has inherited a nightmare.

In this, Labour are not blameless.

The toxic cultural framework adopted by the Tories was conjured by Labour who – in cahoots with the left-leaning press – made Tory MPs fearful of pursuing conservative values.

The power of cancel culture is not limited to episodes of Fawlty Towers vanishing from streaming platforms. Conservatism itself has been cancelled by the sneers of the press gallery. To declare oneself a conservative is to invite accusations of being ‘far-right’, a ‘racist’, or a ‘fascist’.

Part of the problem is the weakness of today’s politicians to resist these false charges, particularly those who see Parliament as an elevator to the top floors of private boardrooms or foreign bureaucracies who enjoy the prestige of democracy but revile at the icky process of public consent.

Tories are particularly guilty of this because they come from ambitious families. In the corporate world this is fine, but when combined with civic duty it is a personal motivation that often curdles.

Politicians who are worried about their future careers are incapable of prioritising the needs of the nation.

Responsible people are always thinking, ‘But what if I lose my job? My house? My car? My kid’s position in school?’ It’s an understandable concern that clips the wings of political influence. Many on the left breathe activism and, having led reckless lives, have nothing to lose. This makes their passion compelling – even if it’s also insane. The right have to rekindle their political soul without losing their minds. I fear that will only happen after people re-discover, en masse, what it means to live as a slave of the State. Then the virtues of the Enlightenment will burn again far brighter than any cynical collectivist ploy. The problem is, we all have short lives and it would be nice if we could skip the second coming of the Dark Ages and get to the bit where we remember that freedom is good and dictators are bad.

Things are getting particularly frightening now because politicians have added a layer of identity politics to democracy which allows them to rank the citizens of society by ‘desirability’. They pretend this ladder is one of victimhood, where the left seeks to raise the oppressed. In reality, it’s a scale of usefulness, where they work out who they need to bribe (and who to steal from) to win seats and stay in power.

The UK looks like the third-world not only because it has done its best to import the third-world, but also because it is playing third-world politics.

British Parliament and its politicians have discarded the primacy of the individual and embraced the predatory politics of collectivism.

Both the Tories and Labour tried to play collectivist politics, the only difference being that the Tories aren’t very good at it.

Back to the question, did the Tories want to win?

You’d be hard-pressed to say that Rishi Sunak’s heart was in the campaign.

Announcing an early election in the middle of a downpour didn’t scream excitement. We never saw Sunak go out and skewer Keir Starmer over the easy topics nor did he clamber up above the crowd and rustle them into cheers. Energy – where is it? Momentum? Jonathan, the Seychelles giant tortoise who hatched in 1832, has seen more action than the Tory leadership. Upon leaving his post, Sunak called Starmer a ‘decent public-spirited man’. Nope.

Sunak served the role of an expensive band-aid that never sticks properly and comes off on your sock a few seconds into a hike. If you’ve got a gaping wound, as conservative politics does, you need a Farage-style cross between plaster and duct-tape.

So yes, I believe it’s fair to suggest they didn’t try their best.

The Tories peddled ‘economically conservative but socially Labour with a champagne flute of eco-cool’ politics which failed to fool the left and angered the right. In the end, no one voted for them.

Left-wing authors, who are normally insufferable, are correct when they say there is scarcely a period in history in which a conservative government achieved so little. The Tories were so ideologically demented that they even refused to implement Brexit – the one policy they had a national mandate to do.

Western democracy is not moderated by collectivist thinking. Collectivist thinking is not the dilution of evil capitalism with a bit of ‘kindness’. Collectivism is a poison of the mind that progresses through the ranks of civilisation until it proves fatal. Revolution is its final form with the lesions and boils of civil strife indicating that the condition has advanced to a point of significant danger.

This is where the UK is – battling collectivism from multiple wounds. Eco-fascism, Islamic socialist revolutionaries, BLM race collectivist communists, and good old fashioned world domination globalists. They’ve all good their knives twisting in the UK.

‘The work of change begins immediately,’ said Starmer, upon ascending the throne.

You certainly can’t call Starmer a liar.