WHEN candidates for the leadership of the Tory Party — and at this moment the office of prime minister — argue that their opponent backs “socialist” policies we have to wonder if we have entered an alternative universe in which the normal rules of political gravity no longer apply.

It is true that the Conservative Party exists mostly in a hermetically sealed ideological bubble in which the issues that animate the great majority of people only appear as relevant if they threaten the party’s grip on power.

A clear illustration of this principle is the result of a poll conducted among the Tory faithful this week by Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper which showed that intervention to prevent climate change is at the very bottom of their priorities.

The candidate selection process — successive rounds of votes by MPs to eliminate all but the last two — has proved to be a revealing exercise in the ways in which Tories can be surprisingly lightweight when it comes to setting out a coherent strategy.

Partly this due to the constant need for defenders of the status quo (we can include most of Keir Starmer’s entourage in this category as well as most Lib Dems and rather too many Scottish Nationalists) to obscure the real significance of their policies.

Thus, Rishi Sunak is forced into a robust defence of necessity — the “giveaway” income support policies which he fronted up during the pandemic — even though this does not play well with his immediate target audiences and the suspicion is that he wasn't that keen on it himself.

Sunak sees beyond the Parliamentary Tory Party and the Tory membership to reassure Britain’s ruling class of bankers, bureaucrats and business bosses that he is the safest pair of hands to manage the economic storms that are gathering.

In the successive rounds of voting, he has come top but well short of a winning plurality. His problem is that both his immediate electorates — Tory MPs and then party members — notoriously lack strategic vision and are not given to long-term thinking about systemic threats that face 21st-century British capitalism.

In the last decade or so the Tory Party has provided us with three prime ministers — each substantially different but each given the task of steering the state through troubled times in which Britain’s elites were deeply divided.

Compare the pre-referendum rhetoric of the Cameron/Osborne administration with Theresa May’s hopeless stewardship of a divided party and match this against the chaotic Brexit period with Boris Johnson in charge and we must conclude that the business of the Tory Party is staying in office independent of any claim to continuity of thought or action.

In surviving this they are presently aided by a complete lack of coherent alternative from the official opposition.

For a politician performatively against higher taxes, Sunak has gifted us the highest levels of taxation for two or more generations (and this with corporation tax so substantially lower than when Margaret Thatcher was in No 10 that he has suggested raising it from 19 per cent to 25 per cent.) The Iron Lady herself only managed to get it down from 52 per cent to 34 per cent.

Today’s tax burden falls largely on people whose income is drawn from selling their labour power rather than from rent, interest and profits and least of all on the richest.

Obscuring this truth is a precondition for establishing the Tories media-manufactured reputation for fiscal responsibility. Sunak’s strongest suit — and his vulnerability — lies in this contradiction, hence his attack on Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss for “fantasy economics” in the pitch to borrow to fund tax cuts.

Despite Truss’s sartorial Thatcher tribute act, she is only incidentally true to her model save that Thatcher herself was an early enthusiast for Britain’s involvement in the European project.

Sunak hasn’t quite grasped that when it is necessary to deliver a sharp blow — as he had been prepped to do — it is best to do it with humour. When he pointed out that Truss was both a repentant Remainer and a former Liberal Democrat his pained expression gave away his unsuitability for rough-house politics.

To me there seems something rather unhinged and incoherent about Truss’s performance. She managed to deliver a few telling blows on Sunak but as the standard bearer of the true Brexit tendency she seems curiously fragile. Her bid to make her Cabinet opposition to the National Insurance rises the foundation of a comprehensive tax-cutting philosophy is a bit thin.

In a week in which the governor of the Bank of England proposes interest rate charges that will add hundreds of pounds to most people’s monthly budgets her suggestion that the “independence” of the bank is debatable suggests she is not quite integrated in the ruling class consensus. Maybe she just doesn't get it.

Among the also-rans, Tom Tugendhat and the terrifying Kemi Badenoch, who were both knocked out on Tuesday, are both unburdened by complicity in any of the present government’s foul-ups and scandals — but both have staked a claim for the future.

Tugendhat is a real security state insider with a solid Establishment background who rose through the ranks of our weekend warriors to land significant security jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan. He will work to bolster Britain’s Atlanticist posture and its imperial role in the Middle East and in challenging Russia and China.

Badenoch is an interesting example of how the top end of the Tory Party has refashioned itself to present a more convincing simulacrum of the British nation than has Labour. A beneficiary of Cameron’s fast track scheme to place “non-traditional” Tories in safe seats, her solidly middle-class family background has been highlighted by a preposterous bid to present her burger-flipping student job into a passport to proletarian purity.

Her game plan is to prosecute culture wars on the home front with “fiscally responsible” fervour. And it is revealing how she has the backing of the “short back and sides” tendency among younger Tory MPs drawn from the rather odd phalanx of the suited and booted that makes up the youth wing of today’s Toryism. Someone to watch.

The closing rounds of this contest have been marked by an unedifying but inevitable display of dirty tricks. The Commons’ library will have been denuded of Machiavelli’s works.

The bid to ensure that in the final round Sunak would face a candidate who is deemed both attractive to the party membership in a ballot but with credible appeal to the electorate as a whole has brought out the stress lines in the party’s Westminster contingent. The calculation was that a strategic transfer of votes from Sunak to Truss might ensure Mordaunt — who, it is calculated, has more universal appeal — is excluded.

The closing stages are less about the real or imagined differences in ideology or policy. More pressing matters dominate the thinking of Tory MPs. Going through the mind of each is the question, “Have I done enough to secure a ministerial role in what might be the last Tory government for a decade or so?”

Machiavelli himself theorised politics as a problem of leadership.

Hundreds of years later the Italian revolutionary Gramsci returned to the problem: “The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entire science and art of politics are based on this primordial and (given certain general conditions) irreducible fact.”

Writing in an age when a new working class confronted its class enemy, he wrote: “In the formation of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is it the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary?

Set against the parliamentary charade it is striking postal workers, rail workers, telecom workers, teachers and lecturers who challenge a Tory government intent on making them bear the burden of capitalist crisis who embody the alternative more authentically than any presently existing element at Westminster.

These lines are written before the final round of the Tory contests and you, dear reader, will know how all this has worked out.

I am off to a relatively tranquil and temperate Italian hillside to deepen my understanding of an Italian political system that is somehow less Machiavellian than ours.

Nick Wright blogs at www.21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.