In October 2005, one of the candidates in a watershed Tory leadership election gave a speech at the party’s annual conference, in the wake of its third consecutive election defeat.

“We’ve got to recognise that we’re in third place amongst under-35s, that we’ve lost support amongst women, that public servants no longer think we’re on their side, that the people with aspirations who swept Margaret Thatcher to power have drifted away from our party,” said David Cameron. “We have to change and modernise our culture and attitudes and identity.” These shifts, he said, would have to be deep and wide, and show that “we’re comfortable with modern Britain”.

Here we are again, with yet another Tory contest, amid electoral wreckage that is both familiar and even more forlorn. Last month, the party’s placing among 18-24s and 25-30s was fifth: in both those categories, it ended up with a truly miserable 8% of the vote. Across the home counties and beyond, the list of classically “aspirational” former Tory heartlands it lost extends into the distance. But there is now an additional element of the party’s woes that causes it no end of angst: Nigel Farage and Reform UK, a confounding force seen as friend and foe.

Among the Tory MPs now tussling to resolve these problems and lead their party out of its electoral dead end, one legacy of the modernisation drive that happened two decades ago is plain to see. Only half the candidates are white, and two of the leading contenders are women of colour – something that surely shames a ruling Labour party still seemingly unable to shake off its addiction to white men.

But the fact that those two aspiring leaders are Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel also shows how flimsy most of Cameron’s revolution proved to be. Along with Robert Jenrick (once a politically shapeless Tory journeyman, now a reborn anti-immigration populist who reportedly wants to bring back the Rwanda scheme), they apparently believe that –........

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