Danny Kruger

That sound you can hear is panic. In the past week, articles have appeared by leading Conservatives including Danny Finkelstein, Charles Moore and Michael Gove attacking Reform for a range of crimes, from backwardness, to policy weakness, to (in the case of Moore, scurrilously) anti-Semitism. The onslaught is getting heavier, and more bitter. Suella Braverman’s move to Reform today caused Conservative HQ to publicly question her ‘mental health’, before withdrawing the slur when someone more senior saw it. The Tory establishment is in the last ditch, and has now resorted to what soldiers call Final Protective Fire – a barrage of artillery aimed at the very edge of its own position. The tactic is risky, but the alternative is being overrun and destroyed.

'Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.' After last week, I feel like Evelyn Waugh at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. The politics of 'progress' has found its fulfilment in the union of two total malignancies: the campaigns to abort babies at full term and to kill old people before their time. Here is our enemy, all disguise cast off. It's the revenge of the middle-aged against their dependents I've been accused of disguising something myself: my Christian faith. And it's true that while I've never hidden it (see my maiden speech) I didn't parade my faith as the basis of my objection to assisted suicide.

They tried, they really did. Dignity in Dying, the lineal descendent of the 1930s Euthanasia Society and therefore great-great-niece of its sister the Eugenics Society, has been struggling for weeks to frame a bill that’s innocuous enough to pass through parliament. Today we saw the fruit of their efforts. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has ‘the most stringent safeguards in the world’, says its sponsor, Kim Leadbetter MP. It’s only for the sickest people with less than six months to live; you need two doctors and a judge to confirm you’re really dying and really want to end it all early; you have to commit ‘the final act’ by administering ‘the approved substance’ yourself.

There is a tension at the heart of conservative thinking today – one that the Conservative party must address if it wants to win again at the next general election. The National Conservatism conference, being held in Westminster this week, is a bold attempt to speak to this internal struggle: how to strike the right balance between the right to be free and the right to belong.  Karl Marx was right in the 19th century when he said that capitalism causes all that is holy to be profaned and all that is solid to melt into air. John Gray was right in the 1980s when he said Thatcherism would eat itself – that the free market depends on social institutions and habits that the free market itself undermines.

‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David Cameron in his last week as an MP. History does not look likely to be kind to his great social policy. We should, however, be grateful to the former prime minister for his quixotic attempt to do the right thing on a massive scale.