Thread by @Staedtler

By rights the Tories should not keep finding their way into government.

The largest number of seats the Tories have won since 1987 was in 1992, when John Major won 336

The largest majority the Tories have held since 1987 was again 1992, when John Major won a majority of 22.

The last full-term Tory government was 1992 - 1997, under John Major

In fact, when you consider how fast David Cameron destroyed the country when he won the election in 2015 with a majority of just 12, you notice an odd thing.

The last stable Conservative prime minister was John Major nearly 30 years ago.

For all their bluster and boast, it turns out the Conservative Party are not very good at winning elections, and haven't been since Margaret Thatcher way back in the 1980s.

Ever since then they have held only a series of weak and fractious governments

Far from their self mythology as a party of government, when you look back at their history over the last three and a half decades, what you see is a fragmented, chaotic party that could only carry an entire parliament once when they were stabilized by the Lib Dems

Left to a majority of their own, the Conservative Party has not been able to govern the country to any useful effect for the last quarter century.

They are a chaotic party, and they have been for a very long time

I'm not going over all that old hat about the coalition.
All I'm pointing out is that the Tories have not been able to govern the country without supervision for decades.

And it's this I think. Their inexperience of unsupervised government, with their inbred arrogance, is the reason they have found themselves in court time after time, been overruled in parliament time after time, lost control of the legislature and destroyed the country

And I think what happened was that the Tories got back in government in 2010 before they had managed to fully regenerate.
And that coalition arrested their development, so that when they won a full majority again they pissed the country away on a stupid referendum

And it was that inexperience, that complete inability to read the consequences of their behaviour, that's what marks them out as not yet ready for grown up government

The Conservative party needs to be in opposition again. They needed it in 2015, and again in 2017, but to their own tragedy they kept finding themselves back in government.

They never finished their regeneration from the last Blair landslide of 2005

Because what they've done is regressed into a kind of cultural memory loop where they keep thinking it's the 1980s again and they can rule the world with swagger and arrogance.