With the dust settled from last week’s local elections in the United Kingdom, a few observations suggest themselves to your Brexit Diarist. For while the Conservative Party is chuffed by its drubbing of the Labor opposition, their own comeuppance may not be far behind. Tories rest on their Brexit laurels — forgetting victory was won in the independence campaign for liberty and against state interference — at their ultimate peril.

Let Conservatives resist the temptation to be distracted by their own partisan press. True, newspaper headlines make much of their “dishing” of Labor. None other than Nigel Farage has heralded the local election results. “The trendy metropolitan Labor party lost the working classes first to UKIP and now on a huge scale to the Tories,” Mr. Farage tweeted. “They will never return.”

This assessment is weirdly echoed by Labor MPs, too. A former shadow defense secretary, Khalid Mahmood, resigned his critic’s post, saying that his party had been “effectively captured” by a “London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors.” In a piece for “Policy Exchange,” Mr. Mahmood said his party was more intent on “pulling down Churchill’s statue” than on “helping people pull themselves up in the world.”

“Is there a danger that our party, in its opposition and confusion over Brexit, has veered towards an anti-British attitude?” he asks, rhetorically, in my view.

A former Tory minister turned Brexit Party, Ann Widdecombe, who was once a member of the European Parliament, chimes in, with characteristic acumen. “The crisis for Labor will inevitably be portrayed as its right versus its left,”she writes, “but its real problem is the distance between the leaders and the led and between the metropolitan elite and the Labor heartlands.”

Such cosmopolitanism is contemptuous of common Britons and their values. In “The Road to Serfdom,” Hayek marks this animosity. “The Left intelligentsia, indeed, have so long worshiped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions,” he observed, warning that “this attitude is unfortunately not confined to avowed socialists.”

Therein lies the self-imposed “traps and mines” for Prime Minister Johnson’s Tory ministry. Since accomplishing Brexit, we see few policies enacted in the spirit of independence. Instead, in the ascendancy is an accumulating adoption of Labor ideals in favor of statism and centralization, whether it be economic intervention or the insidiousness of social engineering.

How much positive popular support is behind the Conservative Party? Or are they benefiting from revulsion against Labour policies that privilege elites over ordinary Britons? Disraeli was sensible to this national mood more than a century ago. Britons, he argued, “adhere to national principles” and “repudiate cosmopolitan principles.” If that be true, then how long before the worm turns? Conservative apostasy around the fallen standard of “maximal liberty and minimal government” will not long go unchastised.

On the right of the political spectrum, alternatives are waiting in the wings — parties like Reform or Reclaim. Short-term self-interest, however, may lead conservative-leaning voters to opt for political representatives in power than in opposition. Yet principled conservatives and disgruntled Labor-supporters will only lend their votes to the Government for so long. Soon or late, they will realize that the Conservatives, too, have been captured by cosmopolitan values.

So Mr. Johnson best bask in triumph while he can. Reform and Reclaim, if they remain true to their pledges, will only gain in strength. Your backbench parliamentary party, particularly freedom purists like the “Brexit Spartans,” will become more restive as Government policies such as “build back better” encroach upon entrepreneurial opportunity. Billions in sterling in debt will further incentivize Government backlash.

The Conservative Party will rue their abandonment of Tory principles and, more tellingly, of the patriotic voters who placed them in power. On the one hand, one doesn’t want to be overly dramatic. On the other hand, we’re reminded of Tocqueville’s warning of the “suddenness” of the French Revolution: “Never were there events more important, longer in ripening, more fully prepared, or less foreseen.”

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BrexitDiarist@gmail.com