The real battle for the identity of the party is postponed until the party is once again in opposition.Since under this scenario many MPs would not be around to take part in this battle, other scenarios which offer greater hope of turning the electoral tide may prove more enticing. It is the least risky on offer but it offers no real hope of recovery and no new policy direction.It is aimed principally at keeping the party together until the general election. The safest option offers little prospect of avoiding defeat in the general election. Confirmation of John Major as leader may keep the lid on the party’s divisions but it will not remove them.

The crucial divide on Europe will not be resolved and the reasons for the unpopularity of the government will not be dispelled. If John Major cannot hold the party together, who can do any better?This scenario offers no solution to the party’s deeper long-term problems or to its current electoral predicament. The advantages of dumping him for another leader are outweighed by the risk of increasing disunity. A different leader might not command sufficient support in the party to win a vote of confidence in Parliament, thus precipitating an early general election in very unfavourable circumstances. In deciding the trade-offs between them, MPs will be drawn inexorably into considering the future direction of their party and whether a radical change is either possible or desirable.Three simple scenarios can be laid out In the first, Major wins re-election. They have to rank the candidates and potential candidates in terms of at least three different criteria.

Who is most likely to unite the party, who is most likely to win the election and who do they prefer ideologically? For few MPs will one candidate come out best on all three counts. The Conservatives are entering a new radical phase, building on, but also going beyond, Thatcherism. In the process there will be a substantial purge of the party and the creation of a new populist Conservativism around the themes of national identity and minimal government, which it would use to rebuild its popular support and offer a very different agenda to that of New Labour.The outcome of the leadership election will be a further signal of how far and how fast the Conservative Party is moving MPs are forced to make some very difficult choices. In that case the European issue will be seen in the future as the cause of the implosion of the Conservatives and the signal for the beginning of a new consensus dominated by Labour.But there is a different reading. Increasingly it would appear that the Conservatives now want to redefine the nation and their political project against Europe.This debate might just be an internal ideological argument of no interest to the rest of the country, a sign of the party’s terminal decline, a spasm in the manner of Bennery in the Labour Party in the early Eighties. The party is reaching deep within itself and its traditions and seems ready to repudiate the kind of European role which Macmillan and Heath saw as a substitute for Empire.

When he was first elected, Major steered the party in a strongly pro-European direction. The centrepiece of his policy was membership of the ERM.Yet since the forced exit from the ERM in 1992, the party has begun moving in a strongly anti-European direction. The traditional arguments based on realism and economic interest have tended to be eclipsed by the strong emotional pull of arguments about British or, more often, English national identity.It is looking increasingly doubtful that the Conservative party can be won again to a strongly pro-European line. For three decades the Conservatives were the party of Europe and made the running.

Macmillan made the first application, Heath took Britain in, Thatcher signed the Single European Act, and Major negotiated the Maastricht Treaty. The party is divided over Europe but it is also divided over its immediate past.Was the Thatcherite era a golden age which provided the signposts and inspiration for the future, or did it see the hollowing out of Tory England, the destruction of the party’s links with the institutions and interests which for so long have placed it at the centre of British public life and equip it with an ability to articulate both the requirements of the state and the needs and aspirations of the people.The party now seems increasingly adrift from the most important centres of the British state and British society and has also lost the support and trust of sections of its core electorate.The European issue is at the heart of the Conservatives’ problem and the crisis of John Major’s leadership. But much deeper questions are at stake.
The election is not just about Major but about the kind of party the Conservatives want to be. MPs have to decide whether preserving unity on the present basis is still possible, or whether the party should be reconstructed around a new programme and under a new leadership.The Conservative malaise runs very deep. It is certainly unprecedented, a desperate move born more from weakness than from strength, with consequences for John Major and for his party that are far from certain.