The biggest political story of the weekend wasn’t the soap opera around Andy Burnham.
It was the death of the Conservative Party.
For those who missed it, there has been a furious online row among the British right over the Government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands. In the real world this is not an issue most people understand or particularly care about (there’s an explainer below, for the brave).
What does matter is what happened next.
Over the weekend, Conservative peers succeeded in forcing the Government to delay a vote in the House of Lords. This was immediately hailed on the right as a major victory. Kemi Badenoch had met a senior member of the Trump administration days earlier, and Donald Trump was now reportedly determined to block the deal.
That the agreement had originally been put together by the last Conservative government was, apparently, neither here nor there.
Over the past few years, the Conservative Party has burned through a succession of failed prime ministers as it collapsed into factional chaos. Each leader appointed their own peers. Each had a resignation honours list. The cumulative effect is a House of Lords now swollen with political oddities, ideologues, and outright cranks.
Two examples tell the story.
Claire Fox — whom I knew in the 1980s as a leading figure in the Revolutionary Communist Party — was elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson for reasons that remain obscure.
Charlotte Owen became the youngest peer in history, appointed for “services to Boris Johnson”.
The current Government has also announced plans to remove the remaining hereditary peers — now fewer than a hundred. Unsurprisingly, this has made the rump of hereditary peers even grumpier than usual.
Put them all together — the ideologues, the loyalists, the cranks, and the hereditary deadwood — and there were enough votes to delay the Government’s plans at the effective behest of Donald Trump.
It’s worth pausing on that.
The Conservative Party blocked a democratically elected British government, on a policy it had itself championed, in response to pressure from a foreign administration. Ten years ago this would have been unthinkable. The people who screamed loudest about sovereignty are now happily doing the bidding of a foreign strongman.
Fifteen years ago, I would not have believed it.
Whatever short-term headlines the Conservatives got from this, it marks the end of British Conservatism as we understood it. What remains is a volatile mix of nativism, voodoo economics, and conspiracy thinking.
The Conservatives survived even their hardest periods because they were the party of the establishment: a dense network of power, privilege, money, and institutional loyalty that ultimately sustained them.
That establishment now has a new vehicle: Reform. And Nigel Farage is unlikely to hand back that power and money any time soon.
What the emerging right wants most now is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. A system of universal rights would be replaced with a system of conditional privileges — granted or removed by the state on the basis of birth, behaviour, or political convenience.
It is not an accident that the parties most enthusiastic about replacing rights with privileges are the same ones with the longest record of protecting the privileges of the few against the rights of the many.
The Chagos Islands: a very short explainer
The Chagos Islands are a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean. They were detached from Mauritius by Britain in the 1960s, shortly before Mauritian independence. Around the same time, the local population was forcibly removed so the largest island, Diego Garcia, could be used as a joint UK–US military base.
For decades, Mauritius has argued that Britain’s retention of the islands was illegal under international law. That position has been backed by repeated rulings from international courts and by votes at the United Nations.
The current deal would transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius while allowing the UK and US to lease Diego Garcia for continued military use. In practice, very little would change on the ground: the base would remain, and British and American military access would continue.
The controversy is therefore not really about defence or security. It is about symbolism, sovereignty, and whether Britain should finally accept international rulings or wallow in Imperial nostalgia.