I knew you knew that, Jonah, as I know you knew. It just made me smile.

If you’ve spent several hundred hours of your life sitting around in shabby meeting rooms with local-ward-level Tory Party activists (ask me about it), you get used to their habit of always referring to the Labour Party as “the Socialists.” So “Tory” and “Socialist” are more obviously opposites to a Brit than they would be to a Yank.

On the main point about Toryism being different from current U.S. conservatism, you are of course right. (As you are about the difference having considerably eroded in recent decades.)