Peter Preston (Guardian Utd): Natural party of oblivion (British Tories)

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Monday July 19

Natural party of oblivion
By Peter Preston

Subject and source, this time round, go together like a hearse and coffin. Subject: the Conservative party. Source of infinite gloom on the way to some neighbourhood knackers' yard: the Daily Telegraph, delivering a load of what it dubs "pitiless clarity".
On June 10, the Tories got their worst share of the national vote since 1832. Four weeks later, Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill gave them, on Telegraph reckoning, "a worse drubbing than they suffered under either William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith". Maybe this is the end of everything, the moment for a new grouping of the right called Forza Gran Bretagna?
Such gloom has a special resonance. The Telegraph is the only national newspaper that supports the Tories through thin and thinner, the only paper whose readership seems eternally blue, giving up the ghost of a chance. Several practical things follow.
One - easily checked when you scan other might-be Tory-supporting newspapers like the Mail or Times - is the growing unlikelihood of any serious press backing for Mr Howard next time round. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, and shrewd newspaper proprietors don't vote for another five years of impotence. Misery descends, so the money won't flow into party coffers and volunteers will fade away. So already we can begin to look beyond the next election, beyond another defeat into the grey middle distance.

Could Britain be headed for a more ideal political structure where the two dominant political parties will be center and left and the parties of the right and center/right will be marginalized?

[Capt_Nemo]

1. No, because New Labour is now center-right

and Tony and his cronies are fully flegged neo-conservatives.

Middle class conservatives now vote Blair. That's why the Tory party is finished.