That the crisis now gripping the Conservative Party is as serious as anything which has happened during this dismal decade for the party's fortunes is not in doubt. But the question that Tory MPS are increasingly asking themselves and anyone else prepared to lend a sympathetic ear is altogether more apocalyptic. It is whether the party's decline has now achieved a momentum from which recovery may be impossible. As a rule, Bagehot is inclined to dismiss such talk as nothing more than a fit of the vapours―a condition to which the modern Conservative MP is excessively prone. Just as Adam Smith observed that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, so too is there a considerable capacity for ruin in a political entity that has been the dominant party of government for 170 or so years. Yet, such is the current mood of despair that the idea the Conservative Party might simply disappear from view, much as the Liberals did after the first world war, is now seriously discussed. "No party has a divine right to exist," has become a kind of mantra for MPS who want to demonstrate that they fully understand the gravity of their predicament.
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