While Tory MPs agonise over whether to attend a soup kitchen, Neil Kinnock had to change his party’s position – and his own strongly held personal convictions – in every major policy area. In the 1980s Kinnock was on the front pages most days of the week, the media paradoxically reaffirming Labour’s relevance as it reported extensively on its near-demise. The Conservatives are hardly ever in the newspapers these days. They have become irrelevant.This is very odd, utterly different from Labour’s dilemmas in the 1980s.

In the media and in terms of ideas generally, the right is still a formidable force in Britain. Even after two landslide wins the Government still feels obliged to pay occasional homage to its Thatcherite inheritance. Last week Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary, exaggerated the role of the private sector in the NHS; Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary, made it clear that she would not touch some schools “with a bargepole”; and Mr Blair played to the gallery over the issue of asylum. On the euro, the Government is still too scared to put the case for entry, its near-silence a tribute to the strength of the deadly right-wing newspapers. Another of the Government’s declared aims was to “modernise” Britain. What chances are there for substantial modernisation after the Queen Mother’s funeral and the Jubilee, both of which were propaganda triumphs for the traditionalist right?One of the great political books from the last century was George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, which related social and economic changes in the early 1900s to the decline of the Liberal Party This decline is quite different. Conservative England is alive and kicking, its ideas rarely challenged, its newspapers as poisonously self-confident as ever.

But the Conservative Party is disappearing in front of our very eyes
More from Steve Richards. I seldom meet anyone who is against the idea of free speech. Most people are all in favour of it, until you say something like “Isn’t it a relief that England aren’t playing in today’s World Cup final?” or “Who gives a toss if Henman is knocked out of Wimbledon?” Pride in English sporting achievement – perhaps I should say aspiration, as English athletes rarely win anything – is compulsory at the moment, as pious expressions of admiration for the Queen were earlier this month. Anyone who chooses not to join in is a spoilsport, out of touch and elitist, rather than exercising a perfectly reasonable preference. Nor is it acceptable to express a mild distaste for flag-waving and the stereotyping of foreigners – that anachronistic world in which Germans are Krauts, and any sporting fixture involving both nations is a re-run of the Second World War – that so often go with it.
I have to admit here that I am repelled by displays of mass emotion, regardless of what prompts them. As English flags started to appear all over the place in recent weeks, I felt very much as I did at the time of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, when mourning was compulsory and people who did not join in were treated with suspicion.

The Queen Mother’s lying-in-state was notable for the triumphalism that accompanied it, a kind of yah-boo attitude towards anyone who has ever questioned the role of the monarchy, paving the way for the absurd flummery that surrounded her daughter’s Golden Jubilee. It is a strange fact that this country, which holds itself up as a model of tolerance, abandons it with indecent haste when members of the Royal Family expire or (more rarely) the England team wins a football tournament.The fact that we create illusions of unity around such trivia surely suggests a nation profoundly unsure of itself. The flags thinned out after England’s defeat by Brazil 11 days ago, as though people were suddenly embarrassed by them, yet it is hard to believe that anyone’s sense of national identity could be dented by the outcome of a single sporting fixture. The things we have been told we should value in recent months – David Beckham’s feet, the Royal Family, the good old English ability to put on a pageant – have nothing to do with my sense of Englishness and even, in some instances, stand in opposition to it. For there is a great tradition of English dissent, of upholding the right not to join in, which is placed at risk whenever the country indulges in these displays of simple-minded patriotism.The situation in the US is even worse. American politicians are fond of lecturing foreigners about democracy and free speech, but look what happens when somebody tries to exercise it at home. Michael Newdow became the most unpopular man in the country last week, earning a rebuke from the President himself, when he challenged the notion that all Americans believe in God.