On yer bike: Modernisers like Steve Hilton have long since fled No 10

The Conservative Party has generally avoided becoming hung up on bad ideas, either about itself or the country. There have, though, been exceptions. Imperial preference, in the 1920s and '30s, and European integration, in the 1960s and '70s, are examples of bad ideas that were highly influential. The first is entirely forgotten. As for the second, a few Europhile voices can still be heard in the upper, older reaches of the Conservative Party, but the European idea today looks not just stale, but absurd.

It is now possible to pronounce the last rites over a further, still more recent, bad idea. For Tory modernisation, too, is definitively dead. It is no longer a project: it is a curiosity. One of the initiators, Matthew d'Ancona, former editor of the Spectator, has written that "the shelving of the modernisation campaign was the Tories' worst strategic error since the poll tax". Few in Conservative circles would agree with that judgment; but Mr d'Ancona is right that modernisation has been well and truly "shelved".

The reason is simple. The Conservative Party is in one of its panics, and no one quite does panic like the Tories. The party leadership fears losing office and the MPs fear losing their seats. In such conditions, they throw out anything that weighs them down. The gunwales are already low in the water, and modernisation has been pumped out of the bilges.

Unfortunately, parties cannot be so easily shot of their egregious mistakes. Simply doing the precise opposite of what the leadership has been urging for as long as people can remember looks ridiculous, and the Conservatives look ridiculous now. The obvious instance is Europe. It was a central part of the Tory modernisers' thesis that Conservatives had become obsessed with Europe — continually "banging on" about it, as David Cameron complained in his first conference speech as leader. "Banging on" hardly now begins to describe the belligerent drumbeats pulsing from Conservative headquarters. Not a day goes by without Mr Cameron striving to appease Eurosceptic opinion in his party with some half-baked, improbable, transparently tactical initiative. Similarly, immigration was another of those vulgar topics that the modernisers were determined to downplay. Negative attitudes were, they claimed, at the root of the Conservative Party's "toxic" image which made it unelectable. The latest Queen's Speech is, of course, all about immigration control. The modernisers also said that Tories should speak about the poor, not seem to pander to the rich. Nowadays, curbing abuse of benefits is central to the government's political strategy. That once-fastidious moderniser, George Osborne, has even linked welfare to the crimes of a convicted child killer. But the most unlikely transformation is of Theresa May, who has changed from sea-green moderniser to eye-popping populist. Mrs May, it will be recalled, delivered the most damaging speech ever made by a Tory party chairman when in 2002 she described Conservatives as "unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive" and christened her audience "the nasty party". The reinvented May is now threatening to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights, berating pussy-footing officials and chastising the judiciary in a rhetorical war with illegals, terrorists and assorted softies.