The party that is forever England

Sometimes, bleak is beautiful. The squally moorlands of Lancashire challenge the eye to chase to the horizon. This is a true landscape of the mind - a place where life-buffeted stoics can find consolation. Of all English counties this is the one where the survivors of the old faith clung on most tenaciously after the Reformation - offering by their witness a continuing affront to a modern Protestant state which was arrogant, centralising and persecutory. The Lancashire desolation and remoteness was a refuge for recusants - awkward people who were stubborn and resilient, and whose best expression was not in word but in action and a capacity to come back for more persecution. All in all, then, a good county for English Tories to huddle as the October winds blow.

Only a tourist perhaps can find romanticism in this kind of countryside - for daily life here has been as hard as in any of the industrial towns Lancashire is more celebrated for - just as it takes an observer to see the poetic truth which is now enclosed in the petrified condition of English Tories. These are the most rejected and despised of modern political types. Triumphalist under Thatcher, grimly residual under Major, bitter under Hague and now, all passion spent, quite bereft of hope. At first sight it is like visiting an old friend who is at death's door: the awkwardness of not knowing quite what to do. Offer false hope for an imagined future? Or make way for the last rites?

And yet, to move among these Tories this week, to look at them as types of Englishness, as illustrations of a certain kind of mentality, is also to realise that this is a party that will never die as long as England lives. This is a very old party indeed - in something other than the obvious OAP truth of its present membership. For the certitudes its people are now forced to rely upon are ancient - if partial - truths.

T his is not of course a question of "policies". Institutes of this and centres for that will, in contentious little groupings, number-crunch away this week. And on the conference stage, men - mostly- in suits, creatures with sharp eyes but dull minds, who have long since been sent to try the loyalty of the faithful, will unveil their platform for "21st-century government".

But having a lot of policies doesn't make you into a successful politician - any more than having lots of ideas makes you clever. What matters is the quality of a character - and it is that temperamental capacity which makes Toryism into something that is plugged into the English mind. Post-old Labour, it is the only such party with an intuitive feel for the deep structure.

When it comes to personality in politics, these Tories know that glib is bad. This is why, faced with too ready and willing a personality - whether Hailsham of yore or Portillo of recent past - they recoil. They know that the readily packaged is false. Over and over again they go for the awkward leader - the goofy-looking Macmillan, the charmless Heath, the screwball Thatcher, the dullard Major, the out-of-place and out-of-time Hague, and now the gauche IDS.

"Modernisers" really don't get the point here. For there simply can never be a Tory version of Blair as leader. Despite his right-of-centre position, Blair in type and rhetoric is as un-Tory a person as you can imagine. He is the glib in action. Conservative, perhaps, but not a Tory.

The continuing purpose of the Tory party is to be an affront to modernity and its illusions of progress. Economic policies can come and go. There are times when in this party's history it is more, and then far less, in favour of capitalistic change. If now it speaks less of markets and of technocratic virtues, it is simply reverting to one of its past models. The language of targets and the posture of pleasing the City of London is now best left to New Labour. What is left of the Tories is simply themselves - they are the only policy they need.

Toryism will last because it speaks to a particular kind of person - a universal being, but one who has always had a particular English home. That being is a sceptic and, while not quite a cynic, is none the less schooled in some deep truths and in an untutored philosophy of the ordinary which is averse to utopianism.

At its worst this can be no more than a specious defence for reaction and hatred - the disabling features of the Hague years. But at a more generous and humane level, it can be a recognition of the limits of political action - an understanding of how the fundamental nature of human beings never really changes. This kind of scepticism is basic to the English political tradition, whose truths force themselves upon all governments.

The old slogans of "power to the people", of "let the people decide", will do their tour around the Winter Gardens like some tired tribute band. The Tory audience will listen and applaud, while knowing that they are but slogans. But those stern unbending Tories who take the long view know that their particular type will always be around and, in some political form or other, will always speak to England.