Britain’s Conservative party now has a shiny new leader. In electing David Cameron, the party’s grass-roots have paid the ultimate act of homage to the Labour leader Tony Blair. They’ve now got what they’ve always wanted, a Blair of their very own. They don’t know what policies Cameron has up his sleeve. They don’t care what policies Cameron’s got up his sleeve. All they know is that Cameron has the right image to appeal to young people and non- Conservative people. They’ve voted for a face that can win an election. They’ve voted for style over substance because they think that style is what wins power, and who cares about the substance. Cameron has oodles of charm, he’s a toff with perfect manners and a good education, he seems to be a nice person, he talks the language of hope and optimism. Above all, he is untainted by the Tory past, by its image of spivs and charlatans and grubby shiftiness and, oh, mean-spiritedness and backward-lookingness and petty narrow-mindedness. So hey, does anything else matter?

And maybe they are right. This is precisely what brought Blair to power in the first place, the desperate willingness of the British public to suspend disbelief in the face of a country whose post-war settlement was buckling. And yes, the old Tories are a deeply unattractive bunch. So maybe the country will indeed be thus charmed by this Lord of the Rings hero Frodo Cameron and his Samwise Osborne — who reportedly watched Tony Blair give birth to New Labour in the 1990s and decided then and there that the Conservative party needed similarly to tear itself up by the roots — as they set out on their journey to throw the ring of Conservatism into the fires of Mordor.

So stand by for (almost) all-women Tory candidates’ short-lists (according to the BBC’s excellent Nick Robinson this morning), and almost certainly support for the whole multicultural, libertine, victim culture lifestyle — and who knows, maybe a dash of exciting, trendy drug legalisation too, just to be in touch with ‘Britain as it now is’. For now we have the new Tory big idea, to be the non-opposition opposition, not just in the political but in the cultural sphere. New Labour’s victory song in 1997 was ‘Things can only get better’; the New Tory song is surely ‘Go with the flow’. And now the electorate has a novel choice — three ‘Not the Conservative party’ parties, a full hand. The rout of conservative values in the political sphere is almost complete.

Yes, it’s a win-win situation. The only losers are the conservative heartlands of Britain, which are now effectively politically disenfranchised; and of course, the nation itself, at a time of mortal cultural and security peril. But who cares about that when there’s an election to win?