Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. On this week's episode, we're going to be looking at conservatism's recent decline, how society has responded to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and whether young people have had their critical faculties vanquished by a certain boy wizard. First up, this time last year,

many were wondering whether the left, in Britain and abroad, was in terminal decline. The Brexit

vote and Trump's shock victory seemed only to compound that, and yet, just a few months later,

the spectator now has a cover declaring that conservatism is failing. How did we get here? And can anything be done

about it? To discuss this, I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Lord Heseltine. So Fraser, the cover of

this week's spectator has the conservative torch on it, but a torch that has been extinguished.

A thing's really that bad? I'm afraid they look pretty bad to me. During this campaign, I was concerned,

and I wrote at the time, that the Tories might well win a big majority, but conservatism would

lose, because this was a campaign where you weren't really talking about conservatism. Theresa May was

making it very personal. Not even the Conservative Party, it was Theresa May's team. Her premise

for this election was Brexit. We need to get Brexit done so vote for the Tories. It was almost

as if the Tories were trying to fold themselves into the cause of Brexit, but without any of the

wider vision that was done by the vote leave last year. I mean, Boris and Michael Gove said

that Brexit was a means to an

end and it was a means to a fairer economy and addressing people whose concerns are being ignored

and other things. This time around, the Conservatives just seem to say Theresa May is great.

She needs to get rid of the opposition, so give her a big majority that she needs, and there

wasn't much else. Now, the problem

was that there are so many issues this country is confronting right now. What are we going to do

about automation? What are we going to do about an economy where wages are stagnant, even though

there was lots of jobs? And I think people wanted a bigger conversation when the Conservatives

were able to give. Now, I don't blame Theresa May for this

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