George Orwell’s memorable take on Dickens, “rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles”, didn’t really fit the Conservatives – until recently, that is.
For most of its history, the party – run by relatively pragmatic leaders unconstrained by rank-and-file members and fuelled by no-questions-asked donations from business backers – might as well have been precision-engineered to win elections. Meanwhile, very few of the Tories we used to love to hate ever proved sufficiently nasty (or sufficiently comical) for us to call them to mind decades after they’d departed the scene.
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