IT’S quite some weeks since I wrote in this column that our present Government is the worst in living memory – and probably the most incompetent and conniving of modern times.

I could write a book about it. Title? Lies, Spin and the State We’re In. I thought things could hardly get worse, and then along came the poisonous emails from the dirty tricks department which first Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown have presided over since that evil day when they came into office back in 1997.

Tomorrow, Alistair Darling – former Trotskyist and supporter of the International Marxist Group and now Chancellor of the empty Exchequer – will be under his boss’s instructions to pull yet more rabbits out of the hat in his Budget speech. But it’s all too late. Nothing can save this Government and the only pity is that we shall have to endure it for perhaps another year or more.

Incidentally, that recollection of Mr Darling’s youthful flirtation with the Trots was not meant as a jibe. Trotsky was certainly misguided, but he was at least an idealist.

He believed in something: perpetual revolution, which was doubtless pretty crazy, but at least it was beyond the lies and spin machine.

And a man who loathed Stalin can’t have been all bad.

I just wish that I could look forward to the demise of the Labour Government and the prospect of something better to replace it.

But then I look at David Cameron and his smooth cronies on the front bench. With the single exception of Michael Gove, who has been brilliant on educational matters, there’s not one of the shadow Cabinet who looks up to the mark.

I have derided the Labour Party for its lack of all conviction and dereliction of principle, but what do the Tories stand for? They won’t tell us – not in any detail anyhow – for fear of taking hostages to fortune.

They won’t do any Tory things, that’s for sure. All modern governments, apart from Margaret Thatcher’s, and hers only for part of its time in office, have gone in for social democracy, the cult of the public sector and micromanaging the economy.

“Butskellism” it’s called – an amalgam of the programmes of the Conservative Rab Butler and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell. What passes for Toryism in most people’s minds these days is not Conservative philosophy at all, but economic liberalism and the solemn dogma of market forces.

So what do I mean by Tory things? I mean the traditional high doctrine of the nation with the Queen at its head and with the understanding that the purpose of government is to defend the people from foreign enemies and to keep the peace at home.

Part of the defence of the realm involves the preservation of its integrity. But while Britain is a part of the EU our nation has no integrity, having surrendered its sovereignty to an international gang of opinion. It follows that any Tory government worthy of the name would negotiate our withdrawal from the corrupt and decadent EU.

But Mr Cameron’s lot won’t do that. They won’t even grant us a referendum on the issue, framed in any way that would lead to a better-off-out result.

In other words, even after the demise of Labour, we’re still going to be living under totalitarianism-lite.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.