Whatever Happened to Britain's Conservatives?

This is the most devastating critique I've read so far, not because it's particularly devastating, but because it's looked upon with something approaching sorrow and pity from someone who has had it in for the Tories all of his political-commenting life.

THE KINDER, GENTLER TORY PARTY

by Christopher Hitchens

Britain's obituary pages are almost designed to bring back memories of a lost or forgotten world, but the news on Monday about the death of Earl Jellicoe was remarkable, at least to me, for recalling an utterly vanished time that elapsed a very short while ago. The late earl was one of those men who used to make the Tory Party formidable: a solid member of the ruling class with a strong sense of his family's obligations. His father had commanded the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 (being described by Winston Churchill, then at the Admiralty, as "the only man on either side who could have lost the war in an afternoon"). That's where the original earldom had come from. George, the first earl's eldest son, had succeeded to the title as he was about to go to university and had gone on to earn several military decorations in the Mediterranean theater in World War II. Before entering politics, he had served as a diplomat in many capitals, including Baghdad, where he'd been secretary to the short-lived "Baghdad Pact," under which Britain and the United States had attempted to shore up a version of constitutional monarchy in Iraq.

Continue weeping through Whatever Happened to Britain's Conservatives?