OF COURSE, it is more than pleasant just to be able to pose the question. But any hubris must immediately be qualified.

The apparent Tory collapse is barely more advanced than Labour’s — the latter’s decay is presently only masked by the appurtenances of high office.

And the main force apparently stepping into the Conservative Party-shaped hole in politics is Reform which cannot be counted an improvement.

Keir Starmer affects to think the Tories are now as Monty Python’s parrot. He treats Reform as the real opposition to his broken-backed government and handles Nigel Farage with a deference he entirely denies to the hapless Kemi Badenoch.

Of course, there is a self-serving calculation behind Starmer’s pose. He — or more likely Morgan McSweeney, who passes for the brains in the struggling Downing Street operation — reckons that if the next election is framed as a choice between Labour and Reform enough voters will be repelled by the prospect of Farage in Downing Street to hold their noses and give Labour another go.

We need set no store by Starmer’s ruminations to nevertheless identify that the Tories are indeed in trouble. They are in a battle for their existence, and in Ms Badenoch they have bought a teaspoon to the knife-fight.

The Tories have long touted themselves as the most successful political party in the world. It might be nearer the truth to say that they are the main political articulation of a most successful — enduring, anyway — ruling class.

Today, they have fallen to their deepest electoral low since 1832, before when such calculations were irrelevant. There were no opinion polls in the pages of The Times in those days.

Perhaps their trouble is rooted in the British capitalist Establishment now being more disoriented and uncertain of its social mission than before.

It has endured crises in the past — the Chartist threat in 1842 and a newly militant working-class movement after the first world war. The latter was the last time the ruling class relied on a Liberal leader — Lloyd George — to ride to the rescue. Mission accomplished, his party disappeared as a governing force almost immediately.

In 1940 the Establishment suffered a collapse in public confidence as it dawned on the country that a pig’s ear had been made of governance over the preceding decade, a situation which it seemed Winston Churchill had been kept in reserve to address.

And in the 1970s socialism, or an empowered working class, once again appeared to menace the social hierarchy and the rate of profit. Cometh the hour, cometh Thatcher.

Her regime obviously met its immediate objectives in defeating the working-class movement and restoring the vitality of capital through the rigours of neoliberalism and globalisation.

However, this programme also eroded the Tories’ own base as it empowered a global financial elite within the ruling class which had little or no interest running Britain except in so far as it enabled unrestrained speculation and money-making.

Thatcher sawed off the branch on which her own party was sitting, leaving its once-hegemonic social networks attenuated and its new ones often strangers in their own society, to co-opt the phraseology du jour.

That her programme more immediately and dramatically sawed off Labour’s main branch too — organised labour rooted in domestic industry — was a substantial consolation which perhaps obscured the erosion of the Tories’ own social base.

Well, if a branch falls off your own tree when your opponents’ timber is crashing all around, does it make a sound? Eventually, it seems.

In previous crises the Tories, were still able to assemble a popular coalition behind their class project sufficient not merely to stabilise the system on its private-property basis, but to do so while broadly respecting the rules of bourgeois democracy.

To take one vital metric, since they became the consolidated bourgeois party in the wake of Labour’s advent, the Tories never failed to secure at least one third of the workers’ votes.

Had they not sustained the capacity to do so, mainly by mobilising various imperial, hierarchical and religious ideological assumptions underpinned by a position of global privilege, they would never have won a 20th century general election.

They could also rely on hegemony among the middle classes, and in the professions. Thatcher began the process of laying waste to that, a process her successors have not been able to reverse, nor indeed have some even tried.

Today, the elite still owns all those mansions in Knightsbridge but it no longer deigns to actually dwell there. It shrugs at the traditions it once sought to embody, and derides the institutions it nurtured.

Britain is now held as an investment as it were, an unappealing prospectus for a democratic polity and not one susceptible to building an enduring electoral base.

Contemporary Conservatives regard teachers and doctors — indeed anyone who works in the public sector — as enemies.

Moreover, it lashes out at props of the established order which it once cherished — the BBC, the Church of England, even the police. It wages culture war on the culture which nurtured it.

The Tories contain a large element which hungers for the verities of a purified Thatcherism, undiluted Hayek, in the socio-economic realm.

Alas, such a position secures almost no support at large. Nor even does it among the market-makers, as the experience of Liz Truss, now a mildly deranged figure on the US conservative lecture circuit, shows.

Yet moving away from Thatcherism, which every leader since Thatcher herself has tried to do to some extent or other, Truss excepted, has proved almost impossible.

Only David Cameron secured enough licence, in the aftermath of an unprecedented three consecutive election defeats, to tiptoe in the direction of social liberalism and an accommodation with New Labour, itself a semi-Thatcherised creation as her Ladyship recognised.

That did not last long. Theresa May sought to tap into alternative sources of Conservative legitimacy, including the traditions of Joseph Chamberlain. Even before she blew her authority in the 2017 snap election, most Tory MPs were having none of it.

The circle was briefly squared by Boris Johnson, who offered the Tory right a culture war nod, the “red wall” workers a levelling-up wink, presented as Thatcher in the City and Keynes in the country and said no more than three words: “Get Brexit Done.”

Such a prospectus did not survive the realities of ruling and would not have done even in the hands of someone more interested in the mechanics of governing than Johnson. The Tories lost more than half their vote between one election and the next, not something it has ever managed before.

Badenoch’s plan appears to be to say nothing noisily. She has eschewed any idea of policy formation, punting the adoption of a governing programme into the middle distance.

Instead, she strikes attitudes, mainly relating to her definite comfort zone — cultural combat, scourging the woke.

There is doubtless a market for that, but it is not one she is being left to corral undisputed. Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson merely need to appearance on the screen to underline that Reform embodies the values of the asleep, or however the non-woke are to be dubbed.

And Starmer is not averse to making incursions into the territory, his views on migration, climate change and trans people being — well, what would you like them to be today?

Anyway, however shiny Badenoch’s culture war armour, it is not sufficient to efface the memory of 14 years of miserable misgovernment.

Nor does it address the menace of the Liberal Democrats, already scooping up the support of kinder, gentler Conservatism.

Badenoch’s sneer that Liberal Democrats were “people who fix church roofs” may be her stupidest single remark — well-maintained churches are a key element of the iconography of conservative Britain, and while foaming Friedmanite zealots may hold the people that repair them as being of small account that is not the view of fabled “middle England” for sure.

Reform is now doing what the Tories are trashing — knitting together a coalition of unreconstructed free-marketeers, angry left-behind workers, racists and xenophobes, economic interventionists.

Whatever you are upset about, Farage offers balm. This will likely prove not to work at the level of Lincolnshire, never mind the country. And if you can’t abide the idea of a return of Andrea Jenkyns to high office — well, there’s always Ed Davey coming down a water slide at you.

Together, they may leave the Tories beached by history. Unthinkable? All that is solid melts into air remember.