IT’s not difficult to understand why corrupt people, very rich people and members of the British aristocracy all support the Conservatives. An organisation that chooses not to poke its nose into your affairs so long as it can dip its beak into your ill-gotten gains will always find support from those sections of society that value the pursuit of money – by any means possible – above all else. That it strives to preserve all those dodgy assets and ensure, by all means at its disposal, that it will never be re-distributed, nor the means by which it was gathered ever scrutinised, enhances its appeal. This isn’t a political party at all; it’s a syndicate.

So, I understand why those with most to lose and much to hide will always vote Tory and I don’t blame them for it. What though, are we to make of those from ordinary and unprivileged backgrounds who choose to back “the nasty party” as it was accurately christened by its own leader? Of course, she wasn’t really annoyed that they were nasty; just that they were making it so obvious. I mean, let’s face it, you never have to wait around very long for another example of why the Prime Minister thinks her own party are a shower of unprincipled, avaricious and vindictive sods. If you miss the latest example there’ll be one along in a minute. So why do people like Ruth Davidson and Adam Tompkins and Brian Whittle and Annie Wells love the Tories and their “values” so much that they want to be their hired factotums?

This summer has been a vintage one for observing natural Tory behaviour in the wild close up. For weeks we were able to see Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and an assortment of other rum characters out of Tory central casting using Britain’s membership of the European Union as a means to win high office in the party. Johnson, ever since he was Brussels correspondent of The Telegraph, has adopted a Eurosceptic position because he knows it gets the scarecrow wing of his party excited.

I suppose though, that is a principle of a sort. Did Gove simply join in because, for a brief moment, he and his wife glimpsed a golden carriage and tea with Her Majesty and were mesmerised by it? I find it hard to believe that these men ever really believed that leaving the European Union had a beggar’s chance in Chelsea of happening.

Yet, they persisted, speaking the racist language of Ukip and playing dice with the futures of thousands of workers and businesses. Each of the Enfield Chuckle Brothers knew also though, that they were sufficiently affluent to absorb any economic shocks arising from Brexit.

Did either of them stop to consider what it might mean for ordinary working people?

Yet Theresa May rewarded Johnson with high office, for he had displayed a pleasingly unprincipled stand throughout the affair that had chimed with her brand of Toryism. She would need men like that toiling away with her in the dirty business of government. But Gove was a treacherous little shit and we all know what happens at public school to treacherous little shits.

And what are we to make of Ms May? When she walked into power untroubled by anything as piffling as a vote she espoused the sort of sentiments that made some of us think she was making a late bid for Pope Francis to canonise her instead of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. “The government I lead,” she said, “will be driven not by the interests of a privileged few, but by yours.”

Barely two months had elapsed before that squishy sentiment was jettisoned. There she was last week, three grand a pop for very rich people to touch her hem at this year’s Conservative Party autumn conference. That’s the price that business executives and lobbyists will pay to have lunch with the Prime Minister or with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond. Thus the two grandest political offices of the British state are being hawked around Britain’s boardrooms and private golf clubs like dancing monkeys in a Baghdad souk. Now we know what Ms May really meant to say on the steps of Number 10 that sunny July day.

“The government I lead will be driven by the interests of a privileged few, not by yours.” It all makes sense now. So, Ruth and Adam and Brian and Annie; this is the party you have chosen. It’s a party which simply hooks nice, decent and ordinary people like you from nice, decent, ordinary backgrounds and reels you in on talk of Britishness and rewarding hard work. In truth though, it is a party which rewards corruption and dishonesty and which uses the great offices of state to tantalise our corporate, tax-avoiding elite with the promise of influencing policy. This is what UK democracy really looks like.

I would urge Ruth and her gang of ordinary Joes to think of all the reforms and legislation that have improved the lives of ordinary working men and women in this country, including their own parents and grandparents. Do they ever stop to ask themselves why the party that they have chosen either stood aloof from them or actively opposed them? Better working conditions; proper pay; National Insurance; the NHS; the right to join a trade union; the right to withdraw your labour; the right to a decent home; the right to work; the right to unemployment or sickness or invalidity benefit (which you and your family have already paid for); the right not to be deprived of your own money by the avarice of bankers: all of them were imposed on reluctant and truculent Tories and most of them are in the process of being dismantled by them.

This is the party you chose Ruth and Adam and Brian and Annie. 

And I’d really love to know what you were all thinking of when you did so.