In his moments of leisure, No 10’s nemesis Dominic Cummings has been devouring War & Peace. In an online blog last week he gushed about Tolstoy’s artistic talent for painting the intricacies of court politics, with all its vanities and perversions. In particular, he seized on the PM’s resemblance to the character Boris Drubetskoy, who advances himself beyond his wildest dreams not through hard work but by mastering “the art of knowing how to get on with the dispensers of promotions”.

Cummings’s exaltation of Tolstoy is slightly humorous. It somehow seems appropriate that the brooding Russian reviled the bawdy earthiness of Boris Johnson’s hero Shakespeare, and wanted him banned like tobacco. Tolstoy would also no doubt have thought Cummings a dimwit. His core insight as a novelist was that clever people who think that they can manipulate events are deluded.

But crucially, just like Cummings and the Tory Party, Tolstoy was a tortured soul. He saw the individual in technicolour – their values, personal relationships, and verve for life. He was instinctively a sceptic, wary of idealism. But Tolstoy was also a fatalist, who believed that the course of history was directed  by unstoppable laws of nature. Clunky denunciations of free will blight War & Peace’s brilliance. Orwell mourned Tolstoy’s nihilistic streak. Isaiah Berlin called him a “tragic paradox”, who betrayed “all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations”.

So too is the Tory Party a tragic paradox. It is led by a professional optimist, but weighed down with an almost superstitious pessimism, as commentators prophesy a shift in the “natural political cycle”. It believes in individual free will, but has surrendered to the apocalyptic terrors of climate change, and the inevitability of welfarism in an ageing society. It is repulsed by radicalism, but champions net zero and draconian lockdowns to stay in vogue with certain groups of voters.
Make no mistake, a battle between the two rival elements of its soul is coming. 

For a time, Boris Johnson soothed its turmoil. As Mr Brexit, he embodied its optimistic, libertarian impulses. As a devotee of the NHS, he indulged its cynical sense of the inevitable. He has, however, increasingly struggled to keep a balance. Fatalism has steadily sucked the life out of his premiership, prompting him to cave on everything from taxes and lockdowns to green radicalism. Gone, it seems, is any desire to stand up to the “computer says no” mindset of the Blob.

Now that he has turned toxic, a reckoning looms. The PM may well cling on, but he lacks the authority to stem the infighting, especially as it becomes ever clearer that his basic strategic formula – Left wing economics married to cultural conservatism – is flawed.

When he does finally go, there will be a leadership contest. My hunch is that it would be between a “continuity” candidate such as Rishi Sunak, who despite rhetoric to the contrary stands for high spending, and a more Thatcherite wild card.
Some might dismiss the prospect of an insurgency from the Right as excessively optimistic. After all, one might argue that the war is already lost. Fatalistic acceptance of social democratic collectivism has seemingly triumphed: taxes are at their highest in 70 years and the state is bloating back to its size in the 1970s.

There is one factor that may yet save the Tory Party: its relentless will to win. The Tory Party has a soul, but it is ultimately an organism; its primary role is not so much to resolve its internal contradictions but to survive – and continue surviving. In this task it has outperformed itself over the years, adapting to the political environment. It has morphed from a gentlemen’s club to a middle class movement to a refuge for the upwardly-mobile working class. After 1945 it went from vilifying socialism as the “creed of ignorance” to singing the gospel of a basic welfare state. It has both fanatically gloried in free market Thatcherism and spurned it as cold zealotry, as the public’s appetite for a radical alternative to socialism has waxed and waned.

The key to the Tory party’s success through all these metamorphoses is that it has never let fatalism totally dominate. It has always found room for policies that seek to create the type of society that votes Tory. It has done this historically through housing policies that encourage a “property-owning democracy” and helping more people to enjoy middle class status by cutting taxes. In other words, it has benefited from the fact that Tory ideas tends to create more Tories.

The problem now is that the Tory party’s current fatalism is unsustainable. In its desperation to give the people what the polls suggest they want, it is destroying its reason for existing. Having surrendered to high-tax statism, it is pursuing policies that are obliterating rather than expanding the middle class. It bankrolls and lionises the NHS at the expense of education and  affordable mortgages – the lifeblood of the upwardly mobile. With public spending prioritised over the economy, the state now has a much higher proportion of high-skilled professionals than the private sector.  For such bourgeois voters, Keir Starmer is far from scary; in fact he is a rational choice.

Nor can the Red Wall make up for a looming collapse in the south. The Tories have committed a grave error in  making Levelling Up the cornerstone of their 2024 election strategy. It would have been more prudent to treat it as a 21st century version of Anthony Eden’s “property owning democracy” – a multi-decade plan ticking along in the background to improve wealth levels in the North, thus securing its voter pool. In the meantime, the Party could have tapped into the middle-class aspirations of Red Wall constituencies (many of which have higher home and car ownership than big cities) by cutting taxes.

Backed into a corner by the PM’s demand for visible changes in time for the next election, the Party is pursuing pork-barrel politics, expanding the state and spraying around money. The result is to recast the Tories as merely a slightly stingier version of Labour, a catastrophic impression to give new Tory voters as living standards slide.

There is no such thing as fate. Boris Johnson is no more powerless to prevent his demise than the Tory Party is destined to destroy itself. Nor should the Tory Party’s will to live ever be underestimated. But the optimistic part of the Tory soul needs to win out against its rival.