The Conservative party has become a weak tribute act to itself. Candidates in a leadership contest belt out classic Tory tunes to an audience that only wants the oldies and knows the words by heart. Cut taxes; crack down on immigration; slash red tape to unleash enterprise – policy karaoke for wannabe prime ministers with no original material. Robert Jenrick, the candidate of the hard right, does cover versions of other people’s campaign hits. He promises to “get immigration done” because it sounds like the Brexit slogan that worked for Boris Johnson in 2019. Jenrick was an acolyte of David Cameron when metropolitan liberalism was the available lubricant to his ambition. He voted remain in 2016. Now he makes bizarre claims that European human rights law is responsible for British special forces “killing rather than capturing” terrorists. Tom Tugendhat, representing his party’s One Nation caucus, trots through the famous Tory moderate dance routine: turn your back on the centre, tuck your principles down low, keep stepping to the right. As a former security minister and chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Tugendhat knows the damage that leaving the European court of human rights would do to Britain’s international reputation. He boasts of his readiness to do it anyway. Flapping incoherently in the middle of the field is James Cleverly. He says it was unrealistic of Rishi Sunak to claim he could “stop the boats”. He also pledges to revive the Rwanda deportation scheme on which the boat-stopping boast was predicated (and that he reportedly once described as “batshit”). And of course no Tory parade would be complete without a Margaret Thatcher impersonation. Enter Kemi Badenoch, comparing herself to the Iron Lady as the explanation for bad publicity over her claim that “excessive” UK maternity pay has “gone too far”. Enemies of conservatism took the quote out of context, Badenoch complained. The same had happened to Thatcher when she told Woman’s Own magazine there was “no such thing as society”. It is unlikely that Badenoch remembers that episode from 1987. She was seven at the time. But when you are playing to the Conservative crowd, there isn’t much safe repertoire beyond the 1980s. There have been six Tory prime ministers since Thatcher. None provides a serviceable model for emulation. They are all either despised by the public or doctrinally unsound in the eyes of the party faithful. In a recent survey by Lord Ashcroft, a former Tory party chair, voters were asked to identify “the best Conservative leader of recent times”. The overall winner was David Cameron on 27%, although 31% had no answer. Among those who voted Conservative in July, Boris Johnson was most popular, on 40%. Liz Truss, who told an audience on Monday that she would have performed better than Rishi Sunak in a general election, was rated best by just 1% of respondents. (Her average score was redeemed from zero by Reform UK voters, who rated Truss joint second-worst among former Tory leaders, alongside Theresa May, fractionally ahead of Sunak.) There is one measure on which Sunak beats all other Tory prime ministers of the 21st century. His was the only constituency that still has a Conservative MP. Witney, Maidenhead and Henley-on-Thames, formerly represented by Cameron, May and Johnson, all turned Liberal Democrat on 4 July. Truss’s South West Norfolk seat and Uxbridge, Johnson’s second parliamentary berth, went to Labour. The leadership candidates can hardly ignore their party’s recent electoral rout, but they aren’t confronting it with candour. They speak of defeat as a combination of accident, misunderstanding and moral retribution. In some versions it was a failure of organisational discipline – good policies poorly sold. In others it was a deserved punishment for deviations from ideological orthodoxy. Both explanations tend towards a single convenient diagnosis. The public craved proper Conservative government and the Conservative party disappointed them by offering something else. “We talked right but governed left,” Badenoch laments. “It isn’t the ideas that failed,” insists Tugendhat. So while the election result might look from the outside like a massive rejection of all Tories and their works, from the inside it is read not as an instruction to change but an invitation to be the same, only more so. This is a familiar trap for beaten parties. The new leader is nominated from a shrunken pool of MPs and approved by a ballot of hardcore believers. The whole process militates against original thinking or confronting the membership with hard truths. Labour has been there enough times. Now it’s the Tories’ turn. Two additional factors tempt them away from an honest appraisal of their predicament. First, there is the perception that Keir Starmer’s government is already floundering. The prime minister’s personal ratings have tanked from a low base. He has failed to impose his own terms on political debate, leaving the public without a distinct sense of the new government’s purpose or a national destination. The huge governing majority has shallow foundations. The pattern of recent elections suggests immense underlying volatility. A modest swing could topple scores of Labour MPs, putting power within the reach of a competent opposition. That makes it easy for Tories to dream of a swift return to power by natural operation of political gravity. And there lies the second trap. The vacancy on offer in Birmingham this week is for a leader of the opposition, a thankless job at which most people fail after a few years spent lurching between crisis and irrelevance. Yet in Birmingham the candidates pose as potential prime ministers because that is the established idiom of the race. In each of the past four Tory leadership contests, the winner has moved straight into Downing Street. The last party leader who never made it to No 10 was Michael Howard, 20 years ago. There are sound historical reasons to see Conservative rule as the default setting of British democracy, punctuated by occasional public indulgence of Labour. That has been the pattern for the past 100 years. Predicting that events will follow long-established trends is often a safe bet, even in turbulent times. But not always. The election result that makes Labour’s command of parliament look brittle doesn’t suggest any hidden resilience in the Tory position. With even stronger coordination of tactical voting, and less public confidence that regime change was a foregone conclusion, the punishment beating might have been more thorough. Some security was traditionally guaranteed by an electoral system that channels support to the two biggest parties, but that mechanism is also breaking down as the Greens and Reform join the Lib Dems in feasting on Labour and Tory vote shares. First past the post could start to produce some wild election results if four or five English parties are all polling in the teens and 20s. In Birmingham this week there has been much talk of reviving Conservatism as a mass movement. But the terrain where the leadership contenders imagine pitching their big tent has been partitioned by Labour, the Lib Dems and Reform. The Tories are not just out of power – they are in electoral banishment. They keep their spirits up by singing the old anthems and imagining that voters will send for them in due course, once Labour falters. But that is an article of faith and, where party loyalty is concerned, Britain is a nation of unbelievers. Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist