These days I think often of Doctor Faustus. Not because I am contemplating selling my soul to Mephistopheles, but rather because I take a moderate interest in the Conservative party, and there is one detail of Doctor Faustus – at least in the Christopher Marlowe version – that arises often in my mind.

That is the detail of what Faustus does after selling his soul. Part of the moral of the play, I suppose, is the disparity between what the Doctor imagines he will do with the time given to him and what he actually ends up doing with it. For, as readers of the play will know, Faustus ends up wasting his time in a pretty big way.

One thinks: you plotted to dislodge your boss and then spent multiple evenings debating Liz Truss – for this?

You would have thought that if you knew you were going to be claimed by the Devil in a few years’ time you would go high on the hog at least. Tick off all the items on your bucket list or the like. But Faustus wastes his time. Indeed he ends up doing bathetic things – like playing schoolboy pranks on the Pope.

This aspect of the play returned to me often during the Boris Johnson years. Here, after all, was a man whose lifetime ambition seemed to be to hold the highest office in the land. After years of japing and jestering, and a certain amount of leadership too, he got there. And then what did he do? A bit of Brexit, admittedly. Then a whole dollop more green. A lot of stupid posts about his dog, and an awful lot of fibs, and then – bang – it was all over. The Devil came for him, and although he was not allowed as much time as Faustus is, it was still possible to look at him and say: ‘What did you do with your time? Why did you waste it? OK – you tweaked some noses. So what? What was it all for?’

Tragically, the same thought now occurs with Rishi Sunak. For once again we have a Conservative prime minister who has clearly had his eyes set on this prize for a very long time. Goodness knows, this was a man who was willing to serve as a junior minister during Theresa May’s premiership.

And then, after a cunning campaign to unseat and replace his boss, he finally achieved his goal. And for what?

At present his government seems to have made a priority of banning the sale of disposable vapes. Last year, in his seminal Conservative party conference speech, he launched a similar campaign to raise the minimum smoking age. And so again one thinks: you slaved away as a parliamentary undersecretary for local government, plotted to dislodge your boss and then spent multiple evenings debating Liz Truss – for this? What was the point of it all? Why do this Mephistophelean deal in the first place?

Certainly, the Conservative party’s latest policy initiatives give a new meaning to the old phrase about ‘the fag-end of a Tory government’. You can see the pointlessness in their eyes. Not just in the increasingly desperate eyes of the Prime Minister, but in the eyes of any minister willing to do the rounds. Ukraine still makes them all feel better. But everywhere in Westminster there is that awful smell of people who’ve run out of steam – and not only on the Conservative benches.

If there is a cause of the enervation on the Conservative side, it surely has to do with one thing in particular. For, like Faustus, the Conservative government don’t really know what to do with their time.

They said – indeed Cameron himself said – 14 years ago that they would bring net migration to tens of thousands a year. As of last year the figure was closer to a million. So nothing to boast of there. The small flotillas of boats that continue to bring illegal migrants to the UK also seem to be beyond the capability of the government to solve. Instead parliamentary time and energy is futilely spent arguing about the merits of taking a few dozen people to Rwanda. Strikes continue across the land, so nobody can say that anything feels especially well-run. And then there is the housebuilding crisis, where the Conservatives keep saying they will meet targets they have never yet met.

‘Well, the Labour party don’t have any ideas either,’ I hear my Conservative friends say, and that is true. Though I suspect it is worse than that. Labour may well have ideas – they just want to keep them hidden from us until after the general election. Doubtless they will reveal them then.

But the Tory party simply has nothing to run on. And that is because the prime engines of Conservative motivation are simply not available to them any longer.

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Stephen Daisley

David Cameron is in a muddle over Palestine

It is a truism of politics that the left runs its politics on the basis of envy. It is not only their right to do so, but clearly their pleasure as well. Envy is a heck of a thing to run on. Indeed one of the great thinkers of the last century, Helmut Schoeck, believed it was the primary driver of all human behaviour. If that seems a little bit strong to you, then you have to concede that it’s one of the major drivers.

The only driver that the right can run as a counterweight to envy is something that, when it is working, it is able to excel at. That is the politics of aspiration. The other guys say someone is keeping something from you. We say that with enough hard work you can earn that thing for yourself.

Except that the Conservative party can’t promise that any more. They can’t even create a property-owning democracy for people in their twenties and thirties during 14 years of Conservative-majority rule.

So when they are turfed out, or find another person to briefly hold the leadership, perhaps the Conservatives could ask themselves that fundamental question. Not why they want to make the Mephistophelean bargains with life that politics demands, but what they think is worth doing with the time allotted to them? It is a question I wish they had asked themselves. For they are going to be pulled down into the abyss soon enough./>