An article in the Times reveals that two Tory MPs, Alan Duncan and Simon Burns, are to help John Kerry's push for the White House and unseat George W Bush. On the face of it, it is astonishing that British Tories should be assisting their ideological opponent across the pond. Moreover, Duncan is a front-bench spokesman. Is Michael Howard going to put up with such political cross-dressing in his senior ranks?

But it would be a mistake to dismiss this as an event of no significance involving a couple of maverick Tory MPs. For a strange alchemy has been wrought within the ranks of British conservatism. A timely article in the US Weekly Standard by the Economist's man in Washington Adrian Wooldridge identifies a new and most alarming phenomenon, the 'Michael Moore conservatives' -- after America's very own stupid white man, who trashes his country and tells egregious lies about it at every turn. As Wooldridge correctly observes, there are now many conservatively-minded Brits who spit tacks about Bush, America, Israel and the war in Iraq in terms indistinguishable from Michael Moore -- not to mention from the venom that daily spews out of the Socialist Workers' Party.

Reflecting on the so far ardent Atlanticist Howard's recent attack on Blair for not criticising President Bush in public, Wooldridge says this:

'If Howard has shifted against Bush--and of course he claims not to have done so--then he is merely reflecting the views of his MPs. George Osborne, the Tory MP for Tatton (and definitely not of the Michael Moore persuasion), reports that John Kerry is significantly more popular than George Bush among both Tory MPs and Tory voters. Indeed, he thinks that Kerry would probably do better in the Tory shires and suburbs than he would do in Labour's urban heartlands. His fellow MPs produce a laundry list of complaints about the Texan in the White House, ranging from his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty to his keenness on God to his general demeanor (he looks as if he "might wail at the moon").

'In general, the Tory party's position on the Iraq war is almost identical to John Kerry's. It voted for the war after much grumbling about "crusades" and meddling in other people's affairs. And now the party is keen to exploit Tony Blair's embarrassments about everything from weapons of mass destruction to the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Unconvinced? Try Sir Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and, for a time, one of Mrs. Thatcher's favorite journalists. In a recent column entitled "I hate George Bush" (at least you can't accuse him of burying the lead), Sir Max denounced American conservatives as "lunatics" and proclaimed that "every single bleak forecast about their follies has been fulfilled." To back up these arguments, Sir Max employed the full gamut of Moorist tropes--America is a land of gun-toting religious zealots; the Bush administration thinks that democracy can be marketed in the same way as Enron shares, etc.--before urging his readers to pray for John Kerry's victory in November.'

Why has this happened? Wooldridge suggests factors including social and imperial snobbery, as well as this:

'The last is Britain's traditional Arabism. Hostility to Israel is restricted to a Buchananite rump in the United States; in Britain it is widespread on the right (as on the left), with fans in the foreign office, the business world, and the upper reaches of the Conservative party. Middle England has thoroughly internalized the left's view of the rights and wrongs of Israel and Palestine, a view that is propagated daily by the BBC, the Church, the universities, and the influential "camel corps" in the foreign office.'

For my money, this is the real issue. Middle Britain is now full of decent, liberally-minded, socially conscious people of moderate political views or none, who nevertheless loathe Israel with a passion and irrationally blame it for the ills of the world. This grotesquely inverted world view is the expression of a culture whose moral centre of gravity has now been all but destroyed by the staggering influence of far-left ideas which have comprehensively colonised the institutions of the establishment, through which they have long and successfully marched.

The Conservative Party's raison d'etre was always, at root, to hold the line for values that were under threat. Without that sense of purpose, it is nothing. Yet now that our most fundamental values of right and wrong, truth and lies, justice and freedom, duty and responsibility, are under attack as never before, the Tories are not just looking the other way but some of them are actively joining up with the destroyers of this culture and those who choose to appease them. In doing so, they are making themselves politically irrelevant. Those of us who wish to fight for those beliefs are being abandoned, while America -- like the famous cartoon of the British tommy after the fall of France -- will shake its fist at the world and say, 'Very well -- alone'.