“Without such talent on its benches, Parliament will be poorer, which is why – were I resident in any of their constituencies – they would have my vote in this election,” said former Prime Minister John Major in a recently published video, referring specifically to David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, and Anne Milton, who were all recently purged from the Conservative Party for refusing to support Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement.

Major is not the first grandee of the party to make such a statement, and similar sentiments have been expressed by Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine. The latter has actively encouraged people to vote for the Liberal Democrats. It should also be pointed out that Johnson’s recent betrayal of the DUP has led to that party cooling on its hardline Brexit stance, and indeed MP for East Antrim Sammy Wilson, seldom the voice of the middle ground, came out recently with some highly complimentary words for the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The trend which has taken place here has been what John Gray, Professor Emeritus of European Thought at the LSE, referred to as “the tightening of the conservative mind.” Recent years have seen the reinvention of the Conservative Party, which has happened numerous times in the past centuries.

The original Tory Party was reformed under Benjamin Disraeli, into something economically conservative but broadly socially liberal which would come to be recognisable as the party which came to dominate during the twentieth century. More recently David Cameron tried to modernise the party and, in effect, reinvent One Nation conservatism for the new age. These transformations have always been the mark of a party recognising changing times, and changing with them in order to survive electorally.

The most recent revolution of the Conservative Party, that which has happened under Johnson, marks the failure of David Cameron, who sought to assert One Nation principles with the party while at the same time curbing the growing UKIP which was siphoning voters, and members alike, away from it.

Steve Richards, in his recent book The Prime Ministers, wrote a comparative study of Cameron and his Labour predecessor Harold Wilson. Both faced similar pressures, both led parties which were divided over Europe, and both called referendums in order to ease tensions. The difference comes in the fact that where Wilson made every decision right, eventually becoming one of the very few political leaders to leave on their own terms, Cameron got everything wrong and resigned in embarrassment.

Cameron’s chief error was fronting the Remain campaign himself, which did what Wilson successfully avoided in making the referendum one on not just membership of the EU, but on the government itself. Many Labour voters could not bring themselves to vote Remain, as they saw doing so as a de facto vote for the Tories. Certain Labour voters may not like the EU, but the hate the Tories. Corbyn will have had this in mind when he adopted a ‘neutral’ stance over the issue; one anecdote that comes to mind is that he used to have a cat called Harold Wilson.

The failure of Cameron’s Remain campaign was a catalytic win for the Faragist wing that had been trying to steer his party to the populist right. This has culminated under Johnson, and the party’s current manifesto is a direct reversal of everything Cameron had sought to achieve in government.

Not only is the governing party enthused on withdrawing from the EU in as staunch a manner as possible, regardless of the risk to the economy, but they have also performed a complete u-turn on the policy of austerity, which defined the last nine years of government, by proposing to increase spending in many areas that had previously been cut.

Rises in spending are, echoing Trump, to be in tandem with tax cuts which no one seems to realise is incongruous and the equivalent of burning your money in a large pile and then putting a deposit on a house.

Traditionally the Conservative Party was closer to Cameron’s vision than Johnson’s manoeuvres; it is characterised today by another recently ousted MP and Johnson rival for the leadership Rory Stewart. Stewart represented the last stand of a party formerly led by the likes of Harold Macmillan, an upper class patrician who had been educated at Eton in European history and multiple foreign languages from a young age, and from that had developed an understanding of Britain’s role at the heart of Europe.

Albeit he would have subscribed the Pax Britannica notion of Britain’s superiority in Europe, but believed it to be integral nonetheless. He was also part of the post-Attlee consensus which followed Keynesian economics in believing in the need for periods of spending to promote growth, followed by periods cuts when the economy was stronger.

The ascension of Johnson to the leadership of the Conservative Party has in reality been the ultimate success of Nigel Farage, in defeating the Ken Clarkes and the Rory Stewarts, as well as the lingering shadow of Macmillan, and steering his former party off into the wild blue yonder of the right.

Regardless of the outcome on Thursday, and all the uncertainty that lies ahead, one thing is very clear and that is the Conservative Party, founded by Disraeli in 1834, is well and truly dead.