THERE is a general, and I think generally correct, assumption that the Tories will swing even harder right if they lose the next election. The questions are — how hard right will they go, and where will this leave them?
 
I got a bit of a feeling for this at the last Tory conference, where there was a lot of just-below-the-surface jockeying for who would take charge of the party if it lost an election.
 
One sign of the shape of the things to come is the Tories who think of themselves as “sensible” are anxious power is slipping from their hands and into the grasp of “culture warriors.” It’s especially bad because in Tory land, the people who think of themselves as the “sensible centre” are already pretty barking.
 
I went to a meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) — this is the think tank founded by Margaret Thatcher herself in 1974, to provide policies for the Tory Party’s shift to free-market Thatcherism. The CPS is currently led by Robert Colville, one of the co-authors of the 2019 Tory manifesto.
 
So the CPS represents a big chunk of the Tory Party. The meeting showed it was an unhappy chunk. Colville was joined by Dan Hannan, a Tory lord, former MEP and one-time vice chair of the Conservatives. Hannan was an important player in the Tory move towards Brexit.
 
This pretty influential bunch were feeling very unhappy. They were very worried the Tories were going to go towards a Trump-esque right wing, leaving behind what they defined as the “sensible centre.”
 
Robert Colville emphasised his “sensible” position, saying: “We call the CPS the think tank of the centre right, a way of saying we are grown-up and moderate and promote a sensible range of policies.”
 
For Colvillese this is quite a “vibes-based” definition of sensibilism. He told us: “The centre right is by definition in relation to the centre and the right. When you talk about the centre right you are sort of talking about the bit of the right that can go kind of go to dinner parties in London and not be viewed as beneath their soles.”
 
“Sensible grown-up moderates” losing power to crazier folk sounds worrying. It is especially worrying when you realise what Colville thinks is sensible, grown-up and moderate: they are an avowedly Thatcherite group, so they are seeing Thatcherism as moderate, which is alarming enough.

Worse, they have, sensibly, moderately and in a grown-up way, adapted to the Tories’ rightwards shift. The CPS was promoting its pamphlet “Stopping the Crossings: How Britain can take back control of its immigration and asylum system” at the meeting.

This CPS anti-asylum-seeker pamphlet was written by “culture warrior” and former Theresa May-aide Nick Timothy, with a foreword by Suella Braverman. The pamphlet is all about deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
 
So, the sensible, moderate, Suella Braverman Rwanda-deportations mob are losing their ground to an even crazier fringe.
 
This new right is what you might call the “GB News crowd.” They had big, well-attended meetings at the Tory conference. Unlike Colville and Co, they didn’t seem depressed.