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The Conservative Party has always been sceptical about officialdom and excessive state control. From time to time its politicians have found themselves sitting on the Opposition benches.

But, previously, the Conservatives haven’t really been regarded as being anti-establishment. It is true that Margaret Thatcher shook the country up pretty strongly. Her rhetoric would

challenge consensus orthodoxies and her reforms tackled various vested interests. But what made it so heroic was the sense of it being a personal crusade. She had some important allies, yet

her approach was not generally shared by most Tory MPs — or even her ministers. During the David Cameron era, we saw some sparks of rebellion. The school reforms went against the educational

establishment — the “blob” as it is disparagingly nicknamed. Over the past year, for the first time, the Conservatives can clearly be identified as an anti-establishment party. As with

Margaret Thatcher, the character of Boris Johnson is important. However, we can already see there is much more to it than that. Brexit was the obvious catalyst. The sense was strong among

Brexiteers that they were being diddled out of the referendum result by different branches of the establishment. For a while, the Brexit Party was the outlet for protest. Once Boris Johnson

became Prime Minister he became, perversely, the anti-establishment champion. The Cabinet, the team of advisers in Downing Street and the bulk of Conservative MPs are all on the same

wavelength. A new breed of Tory MPs, many from unconventional backgrounds, has been elected. Their constituents are not smug and content but disgruntled and pushing for change. The

staunchest opponents of Brexit among Conservative MPs, either defected, retired or were eased out. To say that Johnson’s lieutenant Dominic Cummings lacks deference to Whitehall is something

of an understatement. Henry Fairlie, in a piece for the _Spectator_ in 1955 coined the term “the Establishment” to “not only mean the centres of official power — though they are certainly

part of it — but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised”. To most of us, the meaning has evolved to some extent. It is certainly possible

for some anti-establishment figures — Rupert Murdoch, for instance — to still have considerable power. Officialdom now often acts through quangos, rather than directly through the civil

service. But the term still resonates and if most of us consider what the establishment is, then it is just those institutions the Conservatives are seeking to “take on”. There was certainly

some tension with the BBC during the Thatcher era. But now we have gone on to full-scale war. The future of the TV licence fee is in doubt and we have seen ministerial boycotts of

particular BBC programmes. Suella Braverman, the new Attorney General, is keen for Parliament to assert itself over the judges. Shortly before her appointment, she wrote that:

“Traditionally, Parliament made the law and judges applied it. But today, our courts exercise a form of political power. Questions that fell hitherto exclusively within the prerogative of

elected Ministers have yielded to judicial activism: foreign policy, conduct of our armed forces abroad, application of international treaties and, of course, the decision to prorogue

Parliament. Judicial review has exploded since the 1960s so that even the most intricate relations between the state and individual can be questioned by judges.” Then we have had the

resignation of Sir Philip Rutnam as the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, making allegations of misconduct against the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. Many see that as more significant

than a clash of personal management styles. At question is the extent to which the civil service should be able to get away with obstructing the elected government. For the Conservatives to

have become the anti-establishment party can be a source of political strength in the current mood, as was demonstrated pretty emphatically in the 2019 general election. However, in another

respect, it shows the scale of the challenge that Conservatives face. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, is credited with calling for “the long march through the institutions”. Anyhow,

that has come to pass. The student rebels of the 1960s and 1970s now find themselves bossing the rest of us about. In the past, the “establishment” might have caused some exasperation by its

caution and defeatism but most patriotic people felt it was broadly on their side. It was the rebels who were the enemy. In 1968 there was a trenchant editorial in the _Wood Green,

Southgate and Palmers Green Weekly Herald _concerning some students occupying Hornsey College of Art. It said that a “bunch of crackpots” would not be able “to overthrow an established

system”. It added: “The system is ours. We the ordinary people, the nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, semi-detached, suburban wage-earners, we are the system. We are not victims of it. We are

not slaves to it. We are it, and we like it.” Yet the system has changed so much that the rebels and the “ordinary people” have switched sides. The Conservatives are out to smash the system.

That mission might make Brexit look a bit of a doddle.