Britain is again debating how to ‘unite the right’. In the Telegraph last week, Lord Frost – Boris Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator – argued that the Conservatives and Reform must reach an accommodation before first-past-the-post destroys them both. In doing so, he took aim at some polling by Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative party treasurer and deputy chairman.

Ashcroft found that while the Conservatives and Reform commanded 41 per cent between them, a combined party or electoral alliance would attract only 28 per cent: 13 points disappear when they are brought together. The proposed alliance had an electoral ceiling of 33 per cent, compared with 38 per cent for the Conservatives alone, while presenting voters with a united Right increased UK Labour’s support by five points.

Frost says that voters’ perceptions are not fixed. The statesmanship involved in forming a union, he says, could soften Reform’s rougher edges and make the Conservative party look conservative again. Perhaps. But Ashcroft’s more interesting point is that political parties are not buckets of votes which can simply be emptied into a larger bucket. Combining two brands completely changes the product, and the electorate might not buy it.

Britain is not Australia. Our politics rhyme but do not replicate, and copy-and-paste conservatism from other countries – for my part – is almost always a mistake. Yet the populist surges invite us to peer into the British debate for clues about our own.

To be clear, populism is not a term of abuse. It describes a phenomenon in which voters ignored by an entrenched political class rally behind a leader promising to return power to them. Establishment parties here and elsewhere have to varying degrees earned the revolt against them. For years now progressive politics has made extravagant promises in the abstract – about globalisation, migration, energy, identity and the power of government to remake society – all of which have failed on contact with reality. Too many sceptical conservatives failed to call this out earlier, but that is an argument for another day. The revolt is real and justified, and the big question is what happens next.

Lately, I have explored One Nation’s lack of internal democracy, its centralised authority and its absence of local democratic processes. That is playing the ball, not the woman. Hanson has identified genuine grievances and has an extraordinary ability to communicate plainly. But a party constructed around a single person is yet to demonstrate that it can survive her. Its first period of relevance ended when she departed; its second began when she returned. Candidate selection is centrally controlled, while disagreement has often ended in resignation, expulsion or defection. Its voters are not wrong and their grievances are real. But the party is a long way from showing that it possesses the institutional heft required to turn One Nation into a party of responsible government.

The contrast with the Coalition is stark. It has survived repeated leaders, distributed authority between two parties, six states and hundreds of branches, absorbed bitter disagreements and governed through wars, depressions, a pandemic and decades of social upheaval.

There is an added absurdity in importing Frost’s exhortation to unite the right in Australia: we already did that – a century ago. The partnership between the principal non-Labor party and the Country party, now the Nationals, began in 1923. Across its Nationalist, United Australia and Liberal iterations, it has become arguably the longest-lived and most successful governing coalition in the Anglosphere, holding federal office for roughly two-thirds of the ensuing century.

Over time the Coalition has survived by being agile and pragmatic, accommodating different metropolitan, suburban and regional interests without pretending they are identical. The suggestion that it should displace the Nationals, surrender seats to One Nation and graft One Nation into this partnership is fanciful. They would give One Nation institutional legitimacy it lacks and constitutionally cannot build, while making the Coalition answerable for candidates for whom it has no accountability.

Let’s be real. Parties of government can disappear. Britain’s Liberals were displaced completely by Labour after the first world war. Canada’s Progressive Conservatives fell from 156 seats to just two in 1993 and disappeared.

But great parties also recover from defeats which were universally pronounced terminal. Canada’s Liberals fell to third place and 34 seats in 2011; four years later they won 184. Britain’s Conservatives survived Armageddons in 1906, 1945 and 1997.

Australia’s non-Labor tradition has again and again renewed its organisational form and now needs another big adjustment. In the recent past too much of the Liberal party’s output has been shaped by once-safe leafy metropolitan seats populated by David Goodhart’s knowledge-economy ‘Anywheres’. Lobbyists and MPs have promoted or swallowed the progressive abstractionism of the left. Yet the party’s path back to power has always run through the common-sense aspirations of the outer suburbs, regional cities and the bush: Howard’s battlers, Abbott’s tradies. Aspirational families and culturally grounded migrant communities. Senior Liberals have seen this coming for more than a decade but kept losing the internal debates. Not any more.

South Australia is now a case in point. Reduced in March to five lower-house seats and outpolled by One Nation, the Liberals have now chosen radical internal surgery. Whether the new conservative ascendancy produces democratic renewal or another factional capture remains to be seen. Yet a primary vote of 19 per cent cannot be repaired by tinkering around the edges.

Nor should Liberals take comfort from Labor’s troubles. The latest Newspoll remains awful for the Coalition. Labor’s deterioration will breed ill-discipline; watch for the briefings against Albanese. But an opponent’s unpopularity does not restore trust in you.

History shows that no populist surge lasts forever. As sure as night follows day, what survives in the end depends upon the institutions built beneath it. The Coalition must recover voters attracted by populism while preserving its advantages: genuine democratic processes, newly forged unity, and the economic and institutional seriousness required for government.

Reports of the deaths of the Liberal and National parties are exaggerated; reports of their overnight recovery are premature. But in reality uniting the right in Australia can only mean leaning on the considerable institutional advantages, shared history and muscle memory the existing coalition has, not upending them in a fit of panic.