Since the formation of the Australian Conservatives, many of my hand-to-God conservative mates have been passing around a quote from John Howard’s 2007 concession speech: ‘At the end of my political career, can I say to you that I owe more to the Liberal Party than the Liberal Party owes to me.’ Their meaning is clear: Cory Bernardi owes his senate seat to the Liberals, and has behaved dishonourably by abandoning it mid-term.

Point taken, but frankly that’s a total crock.

This is Exhibit A of what I’ve meant by the dangers of the Liberals’ Führerprinzip and the Howardist personality cult. Senior hacks have worked assiduously to redirect the base’s enthusiasm for conservative government into a blind loyalty to the Party apparat. Not only do they insist the Liberal Party is the sole custodian of the conservative tradition – they’d have us all believe that anything the Liberal Party does is, by definition, conservative.

And this has become orthodoxy, not only with Liberals themselves, but the wider political discourse. Exhibit B: Mark Kenny, writing in the SMH, that ‘any Bernardi gains would derive from discrediting institutional conservatism’s official candidates in the electoral marketplace – Malcolm Turnbull principally’. The idea that Turnbull – Tory slayer,  republican grandee, card-carrying greenie, uncritical supporter of abortion and gay marriage, multiculturalist, and all-around bien pensant – is in any way, shape or form a conservative is absurd. It’s simply not credible to say that the Liberal Party, as it exists today, is a force for principled conservative government. At best, it’s a centrist party; more likely it’s centre-left.

What Senator Bernardi’s done is finally distinguish between the stagnant, institutionalised pseudo-conservatism of Kenny et al. and the vital, evolving conservatism actually espoused by Howard and Menzies and all those luminaries of bygone generations. So Scruton wrote in the first lines of The Meaning of Conservatism that:

Conservatism is a stance that may be defined without identifying it with the policies of any party. Indeed, it may be a stance that appeals to a person for whom the whole idea of party is distasteful. In one of the first political manifestos of the English Conservative Party, appeal was explicitly made to ‘that great and intelligent class of society… which is far less interested in the contention of party, than in the maintenance of good government’ (Peel, The Tamworth Manifesto, 1834). Paradoxical though it may seem, it was from this aversion to factional politics that the Conservative Party grew.

A conservatism that becomes identified exclusively with a single party ceases immediately to be a conservatism at all.

This is the whole of Senator Bernardi’s project: not to destroy the Liberal Party, but to keep the torch of conservatism it carried alive while the Party itself splashes around in the shallows of high fashion and modernism. Take it from him, during his post-launch presser:

My heart, my ethos, is steeped in the traditions of the Liberal Party. That’s about lower taxes, it’s about living within your means, and it’s going to be framed by delivering better outcomes for families, fostering free enterprise, limiting the size and scope and reach of government, and rebuilding civil society. That is how we reconnect with the base.

More:

Every single Liberal Party voter, and particularly those party members, knew exactly what they were supporting when they supported me. My views have not changed. My principles have not changed. My advocacy will not change… They can vest their votes in me knowing that their traditional values and their belief in the enduring principles that the Liberal Party is founded on will be upheld at all times.

Still more:

It is always my preference to have a centre-right Coalition government in governance. But I want them to uphold the principles and values upon which the Party’s ethos is founded… If you frame your policies around principles and values, then they are predictable, they are forecastable, and it will alleviate a great many of the concerns that people have about the nature of politics now.

So the choice is, in fact, quite simple: do you revere the person of Howard and Menzies, or their principles? Are you first and foremost a Liberal, or a conservative?

If a Liberal, then yes, you must condemn Senator Bernardi as a traitor and a heretic. There’s no question about that.

But if you’re a conservative, you may disagree with Bernardi’s methods, but you must (like George Christensen) revere his courage and dedication. You must respect his priorities and hope that he’s ultimately successful in winning back the Liberal Party – and, indeed, the country – for conservatism.

I only ask those journalists who’ve castigated Bernardi for his ‘disloyalty’ or ‘opportunism’ to be frank with their readers and admit that they serve the Liberal Party above and beyond all principles. They should be straightforward and admit that their aim is to put into office a number of politicians pre-approved by professional party bureaucrats, and not to deliver centre-right government to Australia. Then at least we might have a little clarity.

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