BREAKING the habit of a lifetime, I have been worrying about the future of the Labour party.

You know me by now: I am a dyed-in-the wool Tory of the old style – and so I am no admirer of David Cameron who is not a Tory at all. He is the PR man par excellence. He’s never done a real day’s work in his life: from Eton to Oxford and then to be a political wonk for John Major; thence to a safe Tory seat, a steady climb up the greasy pole to his present position of eminence as the man without political principles of any kind.

What sort of Tory could have licensed same-sex marriage? Not Dr Johnson, Samuel Coleridge, Disraeli, or even Harold Macmillan. I dare not even conjecture what Winston would have said.

Precisely because the present Tory party is so flawed, we need a decent alternative.

So why did Ed Miliband fail? If the Tories are hated so much – as Ed kept saying they are – why did they trounce Labour at the polls? I think the answer is plain. We English – as opposed to the French and to the Scots who have always been the natural allies of the French against the English – are not political ideologists.

We are the sort who make do and mend, who make it up as we go along and who bend with the wind. The English do not like political purists. We hate to be told what to do – and even more strongly, we hate to be told what to think. Good grief, even the tyrant Oliver Cromwell – the prototype for Miliband if ever there was one – lasted only 11 years before we made sure we got our king back.

Politicians of Miliband’s sort seize the high moral ground. They are like 18th Century Methodists and evangelical preachers. They claim to know what is best for us and they are determined to impose their will from on high. It doesn’t work. Are Labourites so stupid that they can’t read a little history? The only Labour leader to win an election in the last 41 years was Tony Blair.

His foreign policy was diabolical, but on the home front he knew he had to appeal to a broad consensus. So he didn’t go in for the slogans of class war, bash the bankers and soak the rich which were Ed’s constant theme.

The last time – if we overlook the excrescence of the Kinnock interlude – that Labour presented a left-wing ideological manifesto was under Michael “donkey jacket” Foot in 1983: astronomically high rates of taxation and unilateral disarmament. No wonder Foot’s manifesto was described as “the longest suicide note in history”.

Not long after VE Day, the electorate, weary of war and the constant exhortations to self-sacrifice, threw out Churchill and voted for a Labour government. The 1945-1951 socialist government was of the most ideological, bureaucratic sort, obsessed with centralisation and control; self-righteous to the point of joining the Pharisees; its chancellor the hair-shirt Stafford Cripps of whom Churchill remarked: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” The electorate threw this Labour government out at the first opportunity.

Traditional conservatism abhors political theory, utopian systems and ideology. It understands that human beings are not perfect. We make mistakes and we let ourselves and others down. And no individual or party has a monopoly of truth and goodness. That is why the victorious Tories need a vigorous opposition. I wish the Labour party well in the task of forming an opposition full of practical wisdom.