DURING the summer recess, the Tories have run a series of weekly campaigns on issues like asylum-seekers and crime — all have ended up causing at least as many problems for the Tories as they have for the opposition.

The Tories remain around 20 per cent behind Labour in the polls and are badly split.

Nadine Dorries’s resignation letter to Rishi Sunak was partly farcical, but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.

Meanwhile, on the hard right of the party, Suella Braverman has renewed calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.

There is an issue with this, however: she is the Home Secretary in a government that does not at the moment support that.

In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence.

As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated, he was wrong. However, in a recent Guardian article, he has returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.

The Tories, as a party representing ruling-class interests, have been “shapeshifters” — pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment.

So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act.

However, in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.

Likewise, they were the party of the landed aristocracy, but in 1846-7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class.

In much more recent times, Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into what is now the EU in the early 1970s.

Fifty years on, the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.

The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what ruling-class politics that can also win elections is.

There have been five Tory leaders since 2015, each seemingly more incompetent than the last.

Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became one, not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling-class interests, but because it served his personal ambition to be prime minister.

However, I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that the Tory Party being finished is an absolute certainty.

There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.

The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001, Tony Blair, while tinkering with reforms, determined that his real focus was illegal wars.

Then in the financial crash of 2008, then-PM Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity.

Unsurprisingly, Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories, who had looked finished, made a return.

Of course, Keir Starmer has his own variant on this: if the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space — this is his own version of the “great moving right show.”

So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if only briefly.

The Tories might shapeshift again, however, and move themselves further to the right still, around the racially charged politics of Braverman, Lee Anderson and others.

Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, while a minority, have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping.

When one looks at governments across Europe and beyond, there is clearly a trend here too.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on Twitter @kmflett.