THOSE salivating over reports of the death of the Conservative Party are evidently unacquainted with modern UK political history and the exotic voting preferences of the British public. The consensus among Westminster’s Brexit community is the Tories are so divided over what Theresa May might concede to Jeremy Corbyn that the party is set to implode. We have been here many times before: sticky matters pertaining to foreigners have seen several Conservative premiers cast adrift. The first rule of office for any incoming Tory PM seems to be: don’t get too close to those bloody foreign johnnies unless you intend to invade them or occupy their lands. They should all know the risks by now: appeasement in the 1930s, Suez in 1956, and Maastricht in the 1990s.

This is a wily and resourceful party which consistently deploys the tactics of deflection and cultural necromancy to maintain its position as the UK’s only natural party of government. Since the end of the Second World War the Conservatives have been in office for 42 years out of the 74 available and in another 13 – the New Labour period – it might be argued that it governed by proxy. It remains an inescapable fact of life that the Conservatives are only permitted to govern by the votes of the British working classes.

One of the great myths of Brexit is that Mrs May and the party she leads have become beholden to the monocled, right-wing fanatics of the European Research Group. The narrative has become a familiar one: that she accommodated them too much at the start of the negotiating process and allowed them to dictate her ‘red lines’; that she failed to rein them in as they used colourful and xenophobic metaphors to dismiss EU negotiators in the early days of the talks and that, as a consequence, she permitted their writ to run in her wretched stewardship of Britain’s negotiations with Brussels. It feeds on another myth: that the vast bulk of the Conservatives are decent and moderate types who are aghast at the entryism of these chinless patricians in the ERG.

Ah yes, that will be the decent and reasonable coves who breathed life back into the concept of apartheid with their appalling and racist hostile environment strategy. This, in turn, led to its criminal conspiracy against the people of the Windrush generation who contributed so greatly to the recovery of post-war Britain. At times during the Brexit process they have been heard telling Scottish Nationalist MPs to “go home”. They have cheered whenever Jeremy Corbyn has sought to remind parliament that the benefit sanctions imposed by these ‘reasonable’ Tories are killing people and that their austerity programme is driving tens of thousands into deprivation. The concept of a ‘moderate’ wing of today’s Tories as opposed to those ‘extremists’ in the ERG is a bizarre one. It’s a bit like describing a firing squad as ‘moderate’ because it permits you to wear a blindfold before shooting your head off.

The idea that the Conservatives might self-combust over a soft Brexit is a fanciful one. Hopes that this might well be the case have been raised by talk of a breakaway party of the hard right being formed out of the ashes of Mrs May’s great act of Brexit self-immolation. “Ding-dong the witch is dead,” sang some scrofulous braggards on the death of Margaret Thatcher. The Conservative Party, though, is the army of the undead which feeds not on the blood of its victims but on their natural and very human tendencies towards greed, avarice and self-aggrandisement at any cost. It is fuelled by the very worst in human behaviour and rewards our basest instincts.

It ought to have disappeared with the age of the aristocrats and the beginning of universal suffrage and workplace rights; with the introduction of homes fit for human habitation and the creation of the NHS; with free higher education and a sustainable wage. That the forces of Conservatism continue to exist and be permitted to hold sway over British public life is not down to those who traditionally benefit from Conservative policies but to those who are eventually its victims. By way of explaining this British anomaly it’s been said that the Conservative Party is proficient at re-inventing itself. This is another myth; like saying that there exists somewhere in Africa a genus of vegan crocodiles.

All it’s done is re-package some old values and sell them to the masses via the route of the British tabloid press. Thus, immigrants are all after your jobs; people on benefits are scroungers; to be British is to belong to a superior race and the accumulation of wealth by any means possible is always a sign of honesty and hard work. The glue that holds it all together, as ever, is the fecundity of the royal family and the existence of the British Army, who, as their recent target practice preferences have shown, always know which side their bread is buttered on.

The Conservative way was eloquently and honestly captured this week by Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, who has been described as “the world’s most powerful banker”. His thoughts demonstrate why there will always be a future for the Conservative Party. In a letter to his staff, Mr Dimon warned of the impending apocalypse of socialism which could engulf America. This is a real threat to billionaires like Mr Dimon because, for the first time ever in the US, you can describe yourself as a socialist without automatically incurring the wrath of the gun lobby, or the neighbourhood watch to give it its Sunday name.

Mr Dimon said: “Socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse – such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives – which they frequently do to maintain power. This would be as much a disaster for our country as it has been in the other places it’s been tried.”

Roughly translated this means: “Socialism inevitably erodes the wealth of people like me. It allows authoritarian officials to step in and impose minimum wages and humane workplace conditions. It would be a disaster for lots of other billionaires. Just ask all those rich Americans who had to flee Cuba when Castro stopped their perfectly reasonable prostitution, gambling and vice operations.” It is the eternal manifesto of all Conservatives.