How the Civil War in the Conservative Party Is Exposing Some Tory Truths

The Conservative party is maybe, possibly, imploding. It's hard to tell.

Factional struggles inside Labour are usually quite easy to make sense of – the party is ordered like a pack of particularly dim wolves, constantly running headfirst into trees or jumping purposefully off a cliff. There's the grizzled, ageing alpha who has a few glossy juveniles nipping at his tail, biding their time until they can violently take charge.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are more like a muddy river full of crocodiles. There's something unpleasant going on there, a roiling beneath the surface, but all you can see is churning chaos and occasionally the half-chewed leg of a witless antelope. The party still has incredible discipline when it comes to fighting off outsiders, but it's becoming more and more apparent that everyone on the Conservative front bench absolutely hates each other. And, to be fair, why wouldn't they?

So when Iain Duncan Smith suddenly resigned over the weekend, a small cottage industry emerged, churning out home-spun theories on exactly why he'd done it. His stated reason – that he'd quit in protest over disability benefit cuts in the most recent budget – is a fairly mendacious sham: for six years the man didn't see a benefit cut he didn't like, not budging once as the country's sick and disabled lost £28 billion? It was under his watch that the contractor Atos was brought in to judge thousands of people "fit for work", which "coincided with 590 additional suicides"; he was the leering face behind the socially destructive bedroom tax.

It's possible that he's suddenly developed a conscience, in the same way that it's theoretically possible for a Predator drone to develop a conscience, but it seems strange that it should only be happening now. Far more likely is that he's jumping before he's pushed: his outspoken support for Brexit means he'll probably lose his job in any post-referendum reshuffle, and this way he gets to have a final jab at his enemies in the party.

Most of all, George Osborne. You can see it sometimes, if you're the kind of person who sits at home watching BBC Parliament while everyone else is having a healthy and productive life outside: that grouchy, malicious stare, the seedy and bloated old clown watching with undisguised resentment as some upstart of an acrobat entertains a crowd that once belonged to him. 'I used to run this whole show,' he's thinking. 'Who does this prick think he is?'

Cameron's premiership has seen the Department for Work and Pensions become a puppet regime of Osborne's Treasury, reduced to simply carrying out financial policy handed down from the financial pedants above. And, for his part, Osborne didn't think much of IDS either. "You see Iain giving presentations," he's claimed to have said, "and you realise he's just not clever enough." (And he might be right: IDS once happily posed in front of a spoof poster claiming that "it rained less under a Conservative government".) So when Iain Duncan Smith felt like he could get his revenge, he did: the brute, clammy, lumbering revenge of a very dim man who only knows that he's been wronged.

It's not really surprising that the Tories all hate each other – pretty much everyone hates the people they work with. But imagine working somewhere staffed exclusively by Tories. What's interesting is that, now, it's all breaking out into the surface.

The EU referendum has struck a deep cleaver-blow right through the party, but all the factional squabbling going on now has far more to do with personal ambition than matters of policy – after all, conservative ideology is basically rooted in the idea that personal advancement comes before everything, regardless of whom you have to fuck over on the way.

The Tory government has always tried to present itself as ideologically neutral; they're just Doing What Has to Be Done, and it's pure coincidence that What Has to Be Done serves the interests of their core constituency of slimy, predatory tossers. And in a way they're right. Disagreements in the Labour party are genuinely about principles (even if the question is whether they should have any or not); within the Conservatives, it's just mindless, callous greed. Which, like capitalism itself, can appear to be working as long as the whole system stays cohesive. But now the flood gates have opened and the crocodiles are all bursting free; strange leathery bodies in their hundreds, snapping at each other through our streets.

Cameron has made it clear that he'll resign before the next election, but nobody knows exactly when; for a while now all the petty factions have been slowly starting to probe out their strategies of attack. It's likely that what we're seeing is just the start. Backbench MPs are already climbing over each other to scream their support or disdain for the outgoing Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. How long before they're brawling in Parliament? When will the first shots be fired? Once the Boris Johnson loyalists seize control of London, what's to stop Osborne's air force from firing a missile into my house? All this discord might be great fun to watch, but it's no way to run a country. The current government's main job might be to spread evil, but its promise was always that it would be able to spread evil with the cold efficiency demanded by that strange masochistic streak trembling through the English national psyche. Very soon, it won't even be able to do that.

Jeremy Corbyn has come under some fire for not even mentioning IDS's resignation the next time they met in Parliament. But actually, he didn't need to. In search of a way to really twist the knife, Smith flailed around for a political context and ended up drearily parroting Labour's position: the cuts are unfair, divisive and socially biased. Half of the Left's battle has been trying to convince people that austerity isn't a matter of common sense, but a decision with far less destructive alternatives. As all the venal Tories grab ideological masks for their strange and ancient blood-feuds, they'll end up doing that job for us. For the first time this decade, Labour looks like it might actually be poised to take over the country. The question is how much of it will be left by the time they do.

@sam_kriss

More from VICE:

Twin Blasts Kill Several at Brussels Airport, as More Explosions Reported on Subway

Exposing the Black Sites Behind Extraordinary Rendition

What Do Prisoners Think About the New Sugar Tax?