Heseltine’s Lib Dem switch is just the start – the moderate wing of the Tory party is about to unravel

The zealots have won already. If there is no place in the Conservative Party for Michael Heseltine, there can be none for Ken Clarke, Amber Rudd or Rory Stewart

He may, like Boris, have had the ego, vanity and hunger for power – but unlike Johnson, he has always had the principles to go with it (Getty)

It won’t do them much harm in Liverpool, where they were as popular as a Man City treble-winning souvenir copy of The Sun. But elsewhere, the Conservatives may come to regret expelling Michael Heseltine more than he has reason to regret it himself.

In narrow political terms, removing the whip from an 86-year-old peer may deserve a two-line footnote in future histories of the Tory civil war.

But in symbolic terms, it has the flavour of a turning point. The guy who infuriated Mrs Thatcher by devoting his ministry to regenerating Liverpool in the mid-1980s, when the city was a synonym for brutal urban deprivation, has been excommunicated from what used to know itself as a broad church.

Technically, I suppose, he brought it on himself by turning apostate by revealing in a Sunday Times article that he will “experiment” with voting Liberal Democrat on Thursday. That, as he well knew, is an automatic straight red card offence.

He won’t be the only long-term supporter of another party to do that, and Nigel Farage won’t be the only leader grinning on Friday morning. Vince Cable will be smiling, so far as those sepulchral features allow, as he urges hundreds of thousands of refuseniks, most from Labour, to do more than experiment, and join the Lib Dems for good.

But Heseltine will be much the most significant, and the timing of his expulsion was delectably poignant. On the day Amber Rudd and Rory Stewart “relaunched” the concept of One Nation Toryism, the grandest of its surviving proponents was banished by the Tories.

At the CBI this evening, Philip Hammond will make a subtly coded attack on Boris Johnson, with a grave warning against the next PM crashing the economy with a no-deal exit.

Heseltine put it more dramatically in his piece. He wrote about the Conservative’s myopic focus “on forcing through the biggest act of economic self-harm ever undertaken by a democratic government”.

But his most memorable contribution came in a Channel 4 News interview last December. Tears welling, he spoke with moving passion about the betrayal (a mildly overused word in this debate, perhaps, but persuasively used here) of 70 per cent of young voters who voted to stay by the 70 per cent of old ones who voted to leave.

He isn’t merely old himself. He’s a relic. The standard epithet is “grandee”, but he’s more an item of religious iconography long ago declared anathema by a once small and extremist sect which is about to formalise its dominance by seizing the citadel.

They worshipped him once, when he was the proto-Boris with the crazy blonde locks and seductive flamboyance. When the old folk congregated in Blackpool or Brighton each autumn, they gazed adoringly up at him as he spake unto them from the conference pulpit.

But he was something bigger and better than a prototype. He was the Bizarro World Boris – the diametric opposite to the venal, calculating, narcissistic, bone idle cauldron of entitlement who knows the short cut to their desiccated G-spots today.

Helsetine had the ego, vanity and hunger for power. He wasn’t as precocious or grandiose as Boris, who stated his ambition to be king of the world in the nursery. Heseltine waited until Oxford to record his plan to become prime minister on the back of an envelope.

He may have been a schemer whose motives in spearheading the coup against Thatcher weren’t entirely free from self-interest.

But there was more to him than the assassin who never got to wear the crown. He had principles. And just the one set. Not two competing versions, sitting side by side in contradictory columns while he weighed up which to email to the Telegraph.

Heseltine believed, as he still does, in a strand of Conservatism that disdains demonising the deprived in favour of intervening on their behalf.

Thatcher dismissed his work on Merseyside as leadership positioning. But if that was true of his histrionic resignation over the arcane Westland helicopter row, it wasn’t true of Liverpool. He was, as the city’s inhabitants appreciate, entirely genuine about wanting to help.

He took his revenge in 1990, and in taking her down he ignited the civil war between the fanatics and the reasonabilists nearing its decisive climax now.

The zealots, or in Boris’s case the pretend zealots, will win. Really, they’ve won already. If there is no place in the Conservative Party for Michael Heseltine, there can be none for Ken Clarke, Amber Rudd, Rory Stewart, Nicholas Soames or anyone else who believes in a form of One Nation Toryism other than the Brexit blueprint that leads to the Tories driving Scotland and Northern Ireland out of the union, and shrinking England and Wales into one mini-nation of shrilly nationalistic despair.

They can tell themselves the brave option is to stay and fight from the inside, but they must know that confusing misplaced tribal loyalty with courage is the coward’s self-delusion.

They have irretrievably lost the membership. The ancients who once dampened at the sight of Michael Heseltine couldn’t, as he more elegantly put it with damp eyes, give a toss what their grandchildren want. Today they moisten for another blond and the simplistic Thatcherite certainties and casual Faragean cruelties he offers them. Nothing will change that.

If anyone thought they were taking the whip from Heseltine, they were wrong. What they removed was a yoke. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, Conservatives who share his principles will need to free themselves, and fight for them elsewhere.