My family despises war movies, so it’s way after Christmas that I get to see Ridley Scott’s dire Napoleon film. The most embarrassing scene is where Josephine lifts up her dress and tells Bonaparte: ‘If you look down you will see a surprise, and once you see it you will always want it.’ It strikes me that something similar is going on between Reform UK and the Conservative party, with the result being long-term electoral irrelevance for the latter.

When I think of conservative values, the words chivalry, monarchy and the church come to mind. In Penny Mordaunt, the Tories have a politician who has wielded an actual sword, in an actual church, in the presence of the actual King. Unsurprisingly, a poll for More In Common finds she is the only major Conservative figure with a positive net approval rating, and is worshipped by 2019 Tory voters. But a source from the National Conservative wing of the party retorts: ‘She’s a liberal and might as well join the Liberal Democrats.’ I’ve seen this happen before, to Labour in 2019, when ideologically driven factionalism occluded all sense of proportion, and I can tell you it ends badly.

The moment approaches when Labour has to abandon its £28 billion-a-year climate spending commitment. I cheered when it was announced – because it was a symbolic commitment to young and Green-inclined voters. But I will cheer the decision to let it go. I only understood the problem when I studied the Office for Budget Responsibility’s 2023 fiscal risk assessment. It’s not just that the cost of borrowing is now four times higher than when Rachel Reeves made the pledge; it’s that Ukraine has worsened the debt dynamics out to 2050 – and nobody (including government) wants to admit how badly. The case for borrowing to invest in green energy rests on the government’s own figures: we will have a smaller debt pile if we go early than if we go late. But the OBR’s report cites a French study, suggesting that the debt effect of decarbonising household energy could be five times bigger than the UK estimates. With uncertainties of that order Labour is right to state its overall intent and leave the precise costings to its manifesto.

The defence select committee issues a report that reads like the epitaph for a decade of austerity. The UK is strategically unready for war; its armed forces have huge capability gaps; and nobody has thought what we might do if, tomorrow, we had to start building tanks, making rifles and recruiting personnel at a crisis-level intensity. One glance at the history books shows we are making the same mistakes as in the mid-1930s. Then, as now, admirals had to be persuaded to consider defending Europe, not the Far East, as their priority. Then, as now, generals quibbled over theories of mechanisation while the task of recruiting an expeditionary army hit delay after delay. Then, as now, the public was largely clueless about the threat and regarded conscription as unthinkable. We need to re-arm Britain to face down Russian aggression – both physically and morally. I’d like Labour in power to pursue this as a cross-party effort, but the Conservative right seems obsessed with waging a different war: against the beliefs of the progressive half of Britain.

As I write, Liz Truss is launching the Popular Conservatives. For years, she says, the Conservatives have ‘failed to take on the left-wing extremists’. George Osborne once denounced me from the despatch box as a ‘revolutionary Marxist’, while I was working at Channel 4 News, so I find this assertion strange. But Truss explains she does not mean socialists but ‘environmentalists’, those who say they are in favour of ‘helping people across all communities’ and ‘supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities’ (yes, these are direct quotes). I don’t go to church often, but in my part of London this sounds remarkably like the routine agenda of the Church of England. As for ‘pandering to the anti-capitalists’, I’m not sure Truss realises that half of all funds under management in the world are soon set to be governed by environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) principles.

It feels like the Tory right is getting set for a long march through the institutions; retaking the National Trust from woke pensioners, and the RNLI from its surf-tousled Gen Z volunteers. I suspect the effort will produce something akin to Charles Minard’s infographic of Bonaparte’s 1812 campaign, only with thinner lines and plenty of argy-bargy among the stragglers.<//>