Which way would the Tories jump then? Some, I’m sure, would stay royalist even with death in their hearts But others – I think most – would begin to fancy a republic. Conservatism and monarchism are not inseparable.This is the portrait of a flexibility that is almost monstrous. Adjectives like “unprincipled” or “oppor- tunistic” falter at the reality of the British Conservative Party. On the Continent, Christian Democrats regard our Tories with priggish distaste. For years, they kept them out of the “European People’s Party” group in the Strasbourg parliament, and even now they are only “allied” members of the EPP.

The European right comes fully equipped with a Weltanschauung and a Konzept, armed to the teeth with high-minded cliches about social responsibility and cohesion. The Tories, who don’t seriously claim to be more than a party of organised selfishness, national and personal, give Christian Democrats the creeps.But there is a case for lack of principle in politics. In an unpredictable world, the mighty Konzept can become a ball and chain while flexibility can be a virtue. Tories love Pope for writing “For forms of government let fools contest;/ Whate’er is best administered is best”. And they have another favourite Pope couplet on the matter of selfishness: “Thus God and nature linked the gen’ral frame,/ And bade self-love and social be the same”.There are two main arguments in favour of organised selfishness.

One – Pope’s and Adam Smith’s – says that selfishness is a sort of altruism, because Smith’s “Hidden Hand” makes wealth trickle down from the few to the many. The other argument says that altruism is a sort of selfishness. The theory of “enlightened self-interest” claims that serving the general good is the best way to serve one’s own.But none of these clever defences seems to help the British Tories Having no principles does not make them more flexible. Instead, wrong tactics are pursued with disastrous obstinacy (look at the Mad Cow affair) until each ends in calamity and U-turns. Social divisions have been widened in order to accelerate wealth creation – but the trickle-down has dried up, while the Hidden Hand appears to be suffering from repetitive strain injury.This coming year, I hope, will at last bring the fall of the Tories. New Labour, though frantically modest about its ambitions, can open the way to a broadening torrent of changes to the British state and our methods of governing. But before they go, I wish I could understand how enlightened men and women – and there are many in the Conservative Party – remain loyal to so crudely unenlightened an idea of self-interest My blind spot is nothing to be proud of But nor is theirs..