Is it supposed to be enough for those of us of a culturally and socially conservative persuasion to know that some Tory MPs share our outlook?

Are we meant to look back over the radical left’s march through the public realm during these past 12 years of Tory-led governments and think: ‘Well, at least some Conservative MPs tried to make a bit of a fuss about it, so we’d better vote Tory again?’

It should not take a genius in Conservative Campaign HQ to realise that no, it isn’t enough. Not when one of the Tory prime ministers from this long phase of nominally conservative government has just come out to say she agrees with the SNP’s policy of gender self-ID.

Theresa May – for it is she – was Home Secretary for six years before becoming prime minister and during that time advanced numerous liberal claptrap attacks on traditional British culture and values. These were executed in an apparent bid to persuade leftish voters that the Tories were no longer the ‘nasty’ party.

Her modern slavery act even now is being exposed as having created loopholes for illegal immigrants to dodge deportation. Her decision to make it more difficult for police forces to deploy stop and search in areas with high knife crime, on account of many of those searched being black, was followed by a surge in knife fatalities, especially among young black men.

Now she has joined a dispiritingly large throng of Tory MPs wishing to give official status to the nonsensical idea that male transsexuals are women and female transsexuals are men. The former equalities minister Penny Mordaunt, now a senior Cabinet minister, made that very claim on behalf of the Boris Johnson administration from the Commons despatch box, telling MPs: ‘Trans men are men and trans women are women.’

Around the same time the race-grifters of BLM were able to steer their dangerous and divisive ideas, such as critical race and ‘whiteness’ theories, into becoming orthodoxies across public institutions. Barely a week now passes without a fresh example of public employees and even school children having been forced to pay homage to this nonsense.

This has happened largely because too few Tory MPs had the gumption to fight them off. But some swallowed the spiel hook, line and sinker. Newbury MP Laura Farris actually took a knee, while Wycombe’s Steve Baker declared himself a warrior for woke and called for colleagues to ‘urgently challenge our own attitude to people taking a knee’.

Baker allegedly comes from the right of the party, just like Michael Fabricant, who this week called for Tories to back off confrontation with the SNP over gender self-ID on the vacuous grounds that other countries have recently gone down a similar path.

Whether it be via classical liberals like Baker and Fabricant or social liberals such as May and Mordaunt, there can be little dispute that genuinely conservative ideas on matters of culture and society have been marginalised by successive Tory administrations.

Two years ago Johnson even turned out to support a Stonewall fringe meeting at the Conservative conference, just as that group was embroiled in a militant campaign to elevate the freedom of trans-identifying biological males over the traditional rights of women to single-sex spaces.

Johnson was similarly useless in implementing effective measures to enforce border controls and get a grip on an explosion in illegal immigration. When he did belatedly back the idea of sending illegal arrivals to Rwanda, a swathe of liberal-minded Tory MPs used it against him in their battle to bring him down, with Hereford’s Jesse Norman branding the policy ‘ugly’.

Johnson never made a speech about family policy in his three years in Downing Street, perhaps because he had started so many families himself. But Rishi Sunak also appears reluctant to speak up for marriage and the benefits to children of growing up in stable two-parent families.

Sunak was exposed as a fence-sitter on social policy matters earlier this year when, as Chancellor, he was pressed by the radio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer to give his definition of a woman but refused to endorse her suggestion of ‘an adult human female’.

‘The Prime Minister answered this question brilliantly. If you look at the full thing that he said, I would agree with every word,’ replied Sunak weakly.

Against all this vacillation and seeking out of lines of least resistance we are invited to be reassured by the presence of Kemi Badenoch as the minister in charge of equalities these days: Badenoch who spoke up against critical race theory from the start, who said that Britain was one of the best countries in the world in which to be black, who this week responded with laudable scepticism to the Scottish Parliament’s vote on self-ID, thereby keeping open the prospect of the UK government over-ruling it.

And her presence is indeed reassuring and a promising sign. Had sufficient Tory MPs backed her in the summer leadership contest then she would probably have won among grassroots members and be in Downing Street redefining the future of Conservativism right now. But they didn’t and she isn’t.

Instead, we face the prospect of rooting for her in behind-the-scenes Whitehall battles for the ear of Sunak against the likes of Mordaunt and an ultra-woke mandarin class. After so many battles against the cultural left having been lost or – worse still – never even fought, it is not nearly enough.

We need to be told and to be shown by the man at the very top just what it is that the Conservative party intends to conserve. Right now it looks like nothing. And as one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes once put it: ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’