Who you calling swivel-eyed, you mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy, disloyal, confused, centrist creep!

Some chap called Greg Barker, who, apparently, is the Energy Minster and the Chairman of the 2020 group of “modernising” Conservative MPs, has warned against his party adopting the “swivel-eyed rhetoric” of UKIP. He also tells us that the changes wrought in the Tories by Cameron represent a “one-way street” – i.e. there’s no going back (presumably, to conservative principles).

But those aren’t the most disquieting things this idiot – who, inevitably, is helping to write the suicide note that will serve as the party’s next general election manifesto – goes on to make a number of statements which neatly encapsulate the reasons why the Tories will again fail to achieve an outright majority in 2015 (should the coalition last that long):

“The important thing is to keep focused on the centre ground, particularly now that David Cameron has spelt out such a robust and clear position on Europe, now we need to have a very clear and strong message on Europe… We don’t need to follow UKIP into swivel-eyed rhetoric. People expect grown up statesman-like leadership on Europe, and with David Cameron, that is what they get… There is a real determination in the Parliamentary party that we are not going to let the Lib Dems or the Labour Party grab the fertile ground upon which general elections are won (my emphasis).”

It’s hard to imagine how any conservative MP could be more wrong about more things using so few words. Elections are won by appealing to the upper-working and lower middle classes. They are not won by appealing to the sort of middle-class, public-sector, swivel-eyed leftists who take the Guardian or the Independent, and who wouldn’t vote Tory under any circumstances (unless they were promised a free holiday in Tuscany or a new Volvo estate). Greg and his rich chums (his wealth is put at £3.9m) seem suicidally bent on aiming everything they do and say at people whose vote they will never get. I presume it’s because Greg and his ilk can no longer bear being monstered for being right-wing at drinks parties: they'd far prefer to bask in a Jacuzzi of liberal approval.

As Janet Daley pointed out this week, Tony Blair didn’t win three elections by appealing to the centre ground. He won three elections by sounding as right-wing as he possibly could. In his desperation not to be humiliated in the forthcoming French presidential elections, Sarkozy is suddenly sounding more right-wing than he has since… well, since he was last elected president. Just look at a list of Cameron’s promises from his last election manifesto (by the way, thanks for the Euro-referendum, you lying toad) and you realise that even he had begun to realise that moving right was the only way to fool voters into supporting him - only nobody believed him, because of all the misguided asnd ill-timed "Heir to Blair" claptrap of the preceding five years.

When I saw a photo of Greg Barker, I realised why I knew his name. He’s the rather effete-looking chap who, in 2006, walked out on his wife (a brewery heiress) and his children to go and live with a man, having apparently discovered, around the age of 40, that he was in fact a homosexual. Now, what Greg Barker chooses to do with his penis is largely his affair, and I believe that politicians should be allowed to change their minds on political issues over the years – but why should we allow a man who either took four decades to recognise his own sexual proclivities, or who married a rich woman in the full knowledge that he was not actually as other men were, to insult people who believe firmly in the principles which Barker’s own party once stood for?

The centre ground is only fertile in the sense that people like Barker talk a lot of bullshit about it.

I presume the 2020 group of centrist Conservative MPs are so-called because that’s the date by which they hope to have rendered the Tory Party permanently unelectable. If what the likes of Cameron, Maude, Barker and all the rest of the befuddled, appeasing,  "modernising", "progressive" wets have done to the Tory party is indeed irreversible – a “one-way street” – they should have called themselves the 2015 group.

And if you’re wondering why this swivel-eyed twit of an MP has launched his attack on UKIP now, it’s because they’re currently running at around 11% in the polls – which is where the Tories will end up if Lib-Dems masquerading as Tories go on being allowed to set policy.