ONCE upon a time I might have been there with the Tories – not perhaps in Birmingham, which I find the grisliest of English cities, but certainly in Blackpool or Bournemouth, where their party conference always used to take place in alternate years.

Blackpool offered a home from home for the “representatives”

(as we were told to term ourselves) coming down from across the Border. The town was only too willing to take our Scottish banknotes in exchange for its fish and chips, Irn-Bru and Rangers or Celtic strips: easy to say which ones Tories would have bought assuming (not very likely) they might have got the kit into the auditorium of the Winter Gardens. You could sleep

– if you ever slept – in B&Bs bearing the names of Gleneagles or Tam o’Shanter.

Bournemouth was by contrast a foreign country: England. I recall how astonished we were, a bunch of Scottish prospective candidates, that at three o’clock of a balmy morning we could sit in our shirtsleeves on a terrace overlooking the Channel, by the light of a full moon with not a whiff of wind to ripple the still waters – and at this time of year too, early October. But otherwise it was alien territory: no hope of spending Scottish banknotes here, and too many colonels with moustaches or ladies in twin-sets looking askance at the unfamiliar accents and the heavy drinking.

For nearly 40 years I was a member of the party, from the gauche teenage initiate into the Young Conservatives, where I could never learn to foxtrot, to aspirant candidate getting trained in eloquence by a chain-smoking lady coach, to minor office-bearer in various capacities and finally to rebel, entering on volcanic rows with the leadership after 1999 over its rigid reluctance to admit to itself that devolution had happened and should meet some Tory response other than outright rejection. So in the end I left them all to it and found a better cause.

I still have good Conservative friends, and one or two of them occasionally try to persuade me to come back. But I never will. The referendum of 2014 reminded me how ruthless and unscrupulous, not to say dishonest, the party can be – one of the reasons why it has spent such long periods in power, of course. The referendum of 2016 reminded me how, in the absence of firm leadership (which it did not get at that crucial juncture), it can so easily take off into stark, staring insanity quite careless of the consequences.

Some things will always remain the same, but in other respects they move on too. In international affairs, the Tories were by tradition and training the more constructive of the UK’s two big parties. Whether in the old days it was a matter of the Empire or Commonwealth, or latterly of the EU, with a firm American alliance as a backstop to the whole ingenious structure of external relationships, the Conservative Prime Ministers glided with finesse among the range of commitments. Labour leaders never felt truly comfortable with any of them.

These external relationships were not always congenial to the voters either. But Tories continued to value the connections to the Commonwealth even after they led the UK into Europe, while the Anglo-American relationship (as I think we must call it in this case) was stronger under Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan than at any time since the wartime coalition between Churchill and Roosevelt. All encountered resistance in public opinion of one kind and another, if not from the right then from the left. But Conservative governments in London grandly ignored it in pursuit of the UK’s higher interests.

This is no longer so. The roots of the change reach deep. Right at the bottom is the social development of the UK, which has put an end to the deference the ruling class could once rely on: a good thing, no doubt, but it does also mean that the higher interests can no longer be pursued in blithe disregard of public opinion. The best proof of this lies in the saga of the EU referendum itself, which David Cameron, a typical Tory toff but otherwise a weak leader of poor judgment, felt he needed in order to stop his own once loyal voters being seduced by the oiks of Ukip.

There is a second objective force at work. The UK’s generally mediocre economic performance since the end of the Second World War has weakened its global political influence. I’ll give one slightly obscure but telling example. Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 the US and UK are guarantors of the Ukraine’s territorial integrity. No doubt the Ukrainians believed at the time, in the afterglow of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship, that this guarantee was as good as it gets. The US remains important in a troubled region, but today who could care twopence what the Brits think about it? Nobody even asks. If Europe involves itself there, it is through Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande. Such is the fall in the UK’s global political influence in just a quarter of a century.

AT the Conservative conference in Birmingham there has been a lot of shouty discussion about Britain. But I think it’s a different Britain from the one that, say, Churchill could appeal to when he used to come to Scotland and for one of his set-piece speeches fill Ibrox Stadium with adoring Unionists (as they called themselves then). While the UK was already slipping out of the first rank of great powers, it might not yet feel that way if you had one of the victors over Hitler standing in the flesh before you.

By the time of Gordon Brown, the same kind of rhetoric sounded hollow. In his personal campaigns to save the Union, he started appealing to British values. But when he was challenged to say what exactly these British values were, the replies came out as mere platitudes: personal liberty but social solidarity, economic enterprise but corporate responsibility, and so on. In fact the British values seemed much the same as those of any successful European democracy, and gave no specific reason for pride in the UK.

This week in Birmingham the British cupboard is just as bare. The Tories also bang on about Britain, yet it is still no clearer exactly what sort of Britain they mean. A Britain of free trade seems to be uppermost in their minds. Well, I have nothing against free trade, quite the reverse. I would just point out that where free trade makes the production of goods and services flourish, there capital and labour flock. Tories want the capital but not the labour: I don’t think this is going to work somehow.

In the classic era of British free trade during the Victorian era, there were no restrictions on immigration to the UK. They first came in with the Aliens Act of 1905, passed because it was feared too many Russian Jews were fleeing here to escape the Tsarist pogroms. Later even the Tories welcomed these Jews or their offspring, in fact promoted them to the top: the Estonians rather than Etonians that only Harold Macmillan (not Mrs Thatcher) snobbishly deplored.

The crux of the matter was that in Macmillan’s time the Tory party drew support from the whole UK: half of Scotland, much of Wales, firm alliance with the Ulster Unionists. Today it is an English party. Of the 330 Conservative MPs elected in 2015, 318 were elected in England. No wonder they could not care a jot for the rest of us, and assert it is their preferences that define our interests. Theirs is the “divisive nationalism” that Theresa May this week said would break up the Union.