It takes real effort to kill a political party that has been around for nearly 200 years and is the most successful in Britain’s history. But at the very least, this version of the Conservative party is dead. To quote the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, it has ceased to be. It is an ex-party. In last week’s local elections, of the 16 councils it was defending, the Conservative party lost control of every one of them. It won just one of the six mayoralty contests. The BBC’s projected national vote share for the Conservative party was just 15%. It’s another record low for a party that has spent the last several years achieving record-low vote shares in national elections. This is a pathetic performance for a party often described as the natural party of government.
