A new website hoping to realign British politics in a rightward direction has just been launched in the U.K. by Tim Montgomerie and Stephen Shakespeare. Some will contest my adverb “rightward” in the last sentence because its title is “The Good Right” and its aim is to reshape Tory politics, attracting new people and (of necessity) seeing others drop out, on what might be called a moral-communitarian spectrum. Those on the right most likely to drop out and seek inspiration from another tradition and/or website are, as Tim well knows, libertarians who tend to be naturally allergic to the politics of virtue on the grounds of experience. The fact that one item in the website package is called “compassionate conservatism” will ring their alarm bells very loudly. (To understand why, look up the debate a few years ago between Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg and me in NR and the Washington Post.)

All such ventures are bound to be long shots, of course. Changing either the name or the identity of a political party is especially difficult because the voters have a pretty fixed view of what a political party of any historical importance is like. Changing its identity — as its leaders often want to do — almost never works. But betting against Montgomerie and Shakespeare is a risk too. Shakespeare is a successful entrepreneur in the opinion-polling business, and Tim founded and for several years ran the website ConservativeHome which — and this is not an exaggeration — made democracy a serious force within the Tory party, forcing it to pay heed to the views of its members. (And much else too, but we must hurry along.) They have a good track record.

So take a look at their handiwork here.

The link is not to the main page, but to a page in which they ask (and try to answer) the question: Is the Old Politics Finished? It contains a lot of shrewd observation and sharp analysis in a relatively short space on such topics as the implosion of the mainstream parties, the “Londonization” of the political class, and the kind of political parties that might emerge from a realignment (and which politicians would be in which parties). They have to split Mrs. Thatcher in two, however, in order to put her in two different parties since in their eyes she was pro-EU in government and anti-EU out of it. I’m not convinced here. Government was for her an education in the fundamentally statist, corporatist, and anti-national character of the EU, and she was pretty anti by the time she was ejected from office. And I don’t believe she would have been comfortable in the same party as Angela Merkel, whose attachment to the destructive euro is the precise opposite of Mrs. T’s famous comment on fixed exchange rates: “You can’t buck the market — or the market will buck you.”

But that’s just one small gripe. As a whole the website is a wake up call to Tories on the massive challenges facing their party — and a sign that they may be engaged in a big rethink on what they stand for after the May general election. Answer: Just about anything?