WHEN the Conservative Party’s annual conference comes around, it never takes long for someone to point to the sea of snowy heads and remark how little it resembles modern Britain. This year, I’m not sure that’s true. Aged, grumpy, self-satisfied, pursed-lipped, intolerant, suspicious, divided – this seems like a pretty accurate description of both party and nation at the moment. We are locked in a death spiral with these Tories, plunging towards Brexit and ignominy, set for the most painful of landings. The only parachute available is a tatty old number being thrust at us by the smirking buffoons of the hard left, who in reality want us to fall every bit as much, and land every bit as hard.

I have never felt quite so helpless at, or frustrated by, the state of our public realm. By now, with the ruling party so obviously no longer fit for office, the Opposition has usually got its game together. This is not so much a fag-end Government as a grubby stain in the gutter; yet Labour, tragically, lies alongside it like a grimy piece of discarded gum.

Perhaps, though, we have the politicians we deserve. The reality of Brexit – as opposed to the vision painted by deluded romantics of swashbuckling free traders watched in open-jawed admiration by the rest of the world – is a diminished Britain, a nation of reduced significance and heft, a creepy, paranoid, international oddball who talks to himself and starts at shadows. This was the choice we made together. Why should our elected representatives be anything other than greyly representative?

Tomorrow, Theresa May will make a terrible speech to the Tory conference. We can say this with confidence because this is now the only kind of speech the Prime Minister is capable of making. Since the General Election in June, Mrs May has been unable to come to terms with the personal humiliation visited upon her, to answer a straight question, to exert authority over what nominally remains her administration, to perk up a national mood that has fallen as flat as a Philip Hammond joke.

In his entertaining new diaries covering the Coalition Government, the former LibDem minister David Laws describes Mr Hammond variously as “ghastly”, “dry as dust”, “dull as ditchwater”, “charmless”, and a “prime-time right-wing bozo”. The thing is, Mr Hammond is one of the better operators. The Tory website ConservativeHome published a survey of party members yesterday in which it asked who their next leader should be. The Chancellor scraped a miserable four per cent of votes. Somehow – how? – Boris Johnson remains the favourite, trailed by David Davis and Jacob Rees-Mogg. How has the party of Peel and Disraeli, of Churchill and Thatcher, ended up offering us such grim fayre? Must it really be May or Johnson or Rees-Mogg, the first having already failed and the second and third playing unconvincing parts in a Victorian period drama? When did everything and everyone get so small?

The Tories are so caught up in their internal Brexit and leadership traumas that they have shown little capacity to square up to the major, unavoidable challenges of the times. A survey by the centre-right think tank Bright Blue ahead of this week’s conference found that climate change is the second most important political issue after health for voters under 40 and the most important for those aged between 18 and 28. The Conservatives, after some early enthusiasm from David Cameron, have spent little time on the subject and indeed, in response to the threat from Ukip, were at pains to stress their scepticism.

On other hot-button topics for young voters, they display a similar lack of judgment. Mrs May’s big pre-conference announcement that she will freeze English and Welsh tuition fees at their current level of £9,250 is preposterously lame, while her extension of the Help to Buy scheme, which helps people afford newly built homes, fails to tackle the real and trickier issue of building the hundreds of thousands of new houses that are needed.

The Conservatives have a structural flaw here, which is that their support is predominantly made up of older voters who have a home, a pension, and a variety of generous state handouts that the politicians are too scared to cut or remove. This inevitably colours the party’s approach to the issue of intergenerational unfairness and brings it down on the side of the elderly, whether this is morally and economically justifiable or not.

Even the relatively youthful Ruth Davidson (she turns 40 next year), who seems to be the only senior Tory with any fire in her belly and the ability to emanate cross-party appeal, struggles here. When, during a recent interview, I asked her about the generational divide, her response was uncharacteristically defensive. “I don’t like the politics of envy that seems to have been created about this,” she said. “The younger generation have so many more opportunities in some ways. If you look at the older generation, by and large they had the opportunity of full employment for their whole life, they were able to move from job to job should they wish, or they could stay in a job for 40 years if they wanted. They were able to get on the housing ladder a lot easier. They had a level of security. But the younger generation are more likely to have had an education far beyond the generation before them, they are more likely to have been able to travel – budget airlines meant that the world opened up to them. In terms of the way of working, it’s much less manual labour in general. In terms of the information that you have at your fingertips, any interest that you have, you can find anyone in any place in the world on the internet to share that interest with you. So we are living in a different world.” Good luck selling that on the (rented) doorsteps.

Still, it’s no surprise Ms Davidson finds herself the darling of this year’s conference. She is the one good thing the Tories have going for them: the future rather than the dewy-eyed past or the stillborn present. She is the only one who could tell the party, as she did at a fringe meeting yesterday, to “get over its current nervous breakdown and man up a bit”. A decent bit of advice for the rest of us, too.