Why exactly are the Conservatives so upbeat, barely three months after their worst-ever election defeat? At their party conference, in their leadership contest and in the Tory press, the mood has been unexpectedly positive, even unrepentant, with relatively few recriminations and little deep reflection. During the conference, I lost count of how often people told me the party would be back in power within a few years.

There are some straightforward explanations: Labour’s troubles trying to run the country; Tory relief that they have been given a break from that difficult task; the displacement activity of the leadership contest; and the fact that the grind of opposition has not properly begun yet – all these are making being out of office easier than many Tories feared during the long run-up to the election.

Yet a deeper force is also keeping the party relatively buoyant, one of the oldest and most taken-for-granted factors in our politics: Conservative confidence.

It has three main sources. The first is the longevity and recurrent electoral success of the party itself, which has existed for either two or three centuries, depending on how you define this shape-shifting entity. In an almost self-sustaining cycle, both the Tories and many of the party’s enemies, analysts and historians believe that it is the most enduringly successful political organisation in the democratic world.

The second source of Tory confidence is their intimate relationship with class privilege, social connections and wealth. This year, their party conference was preceded by gleeful predictions from left-of-centre journalists that there would be a........

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