Putin’s war has delayed but not answered the most momentous question in domestic politics: can the government survive?
A month ago, as we waited for the police report into the prime minister’s behaviour, it was in grave danger. It still is.
You don’t have to be a Tory - as I am not - to feel dismay at the possible imminent death of the Conservative Party. We need strong parties of the centre right as well as the centre left. We do not need what the Tories are turning into.
The Conservatives were once a bulwark of the nation, capable of providing strong leadership at times of crisis and seen, until Theresa May’s accession in 2018, as trusted repositories of the national values which all of Britain’s political parties live by: belief in Parliament, the Monarchy, the rule of law, the defence of human rights, of free speech, free assembly, a free Press and (the nationalist parties excepted) the Union.
These are the values of most British people.
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Yet judged by their behaviour, the leaders of today’s Tories, now in Government, believe in none of these things. Senior Tories like John Major and Chris Patten have begun to say so.
In Scotland the party’s leaders have expressed disgust. The voters of North Shropshire, their eyes and nostrils opened by the latest scandals, have signalled that they had had enough. Might they prove harbingers of something less malodorous?
Sane Tories’ awareness of their danger has come late. May’s democratic credentials were damaged by her attempt to circumvent Parliament, which the Supreme Court blocked.
But since then, with Johnson’s own unlawful attempt to prorogue Parliament, so swift and determined has been the present clique’s assault on the constitution and on one-nation Toryism that it is perhaps unsurprising how slow Conservatism’s traditional supporters have been to realise that their party has been stolen from them, that those now in charge of the party are not their people.
While Corbynism festered, most voters of the centre outside Scotland, though drawn in considerable numbers to the Liberal Democrats, felt they had no alternative but to support the Tory party.
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Now, as Keir Starmer pursues his work of cleansing the Labour Party and making it again safe for democracy, the position is being reversed.
The whiff of totalitarianism which frightened voters during the Corbyn ascendency is now becoming a stench - and it is coming from the government benches.
In the animal world, to sever even the rotting head of any creature is fatal: in the vegetable world it often brings renewal.
Tory MPs now have no choice but to hope that the organism in their care will respond to severe pruning, and to return from the recess with pruning knives or scalpels ready for resolute use.
Julian Haviland is a former political editor of The Times