Davis's decision to force the by-election was as popular with voters as it was unpopular with Westminster and the media. When ICM surveyed Haltemprice and Howden. it found an 11 per cent swing in his favour, with almost 60 per cent of those surveyed agreeing that Britain has become "a nation of snoopers", and 69 per cent believing his resignation was a principled one. That's the kind of support that both David Cameron and, especially, Gordon Brown might envy.

But the reaction from Britain's media and political elite – all of them far less popular than Davis – was anything but complimentary. Labour did not have the courage to field a candidate, even to defend the 42-day bill that was supposedly near to their hearts. Conservatives hissed that Davis was suffering from "a rush of blood to the head". Columnists agreed: Charles Moore, in the Daily Telegraph, described Davis's actions as "selfish, stupid, and destructive of... party discipline".

It's that last phrase that gets to the heart of the first problem. Part of the media's dismay comes down to the fact that, after 11 years of Labour government, the media is now, finally, taking the side of the Tories: anything that appears to help Gordon Brown hang on to Number 10 is bad news. But the last thing Britain, and especially the Conservative Party, needs is to replicate the obsession with media management and enforced uniformity of opinion that has characterised New Labour.

For decades, the Tories were, as Disraeli put it, the national party. And as the national party, they were, by necessity, a big tent party. Of course, the doctrine of collective responsibility, so vital in a parliamentary democracy, always applied. And, of course, the party did sometimes split, badly and openly – most famously in 1903, when Joseph Chamberlain led his campaign for imperial preference.

But if the Conservatives had insisted on the kind of strict programme that defined the Labour Party, it would not have dominated British politics from the 1880s through the 20th century. Nor would it have been able to elevate leaders like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher at moments of national crisis. Willingness to tolerate divergences of opinion, especially among party leaders, is a valuable Conservative tradition.

Tony Blair returned Labour to electability, in part, by stealing the Tories' clothes: he dropped the one size fits all programme, embodied in Clause Four, and assumed a pose of patriotic pragmatism. But he coupled this with a merciless obsession which avoided even the slightest appearance of a split in the party: with Alastair Campbell riding shotgun, aspiring ministers dared not risk stepping out of line.

As a strategy for winning power, and for assuring voters that the old "wolf in sheep's clothing" Labour Party was gone, this was brilliant. But the consequences of the strategy for British politics and government have been altogether malign: now, everyone wants to win by insuring everyone sings from the same songbook, and the media's obsession with finding splits, or even differences of opinion, is worse than ever.

The result is the pursuit of the gotcha and government by press office. Because so much of what is deemed to be newsworthy happens outside Parliament, what happens in it matters less and less. And while the quest for splits makes it easier to find scandals to report, it has also diminished the British press: over the long run, reporting on trivia has only trivialised the media.

Agree or disagree with him, Davis's stand on 42 days is praiseworthy, precisely because it is a stand. It may be that British politics are so deeply immersed in the media culture of New Labour that neither he, his party, nor his country will benefit from his example. If so, Davis's own fate is, by comparison, a minor matter: the Tories, and the quality of governance in Britain, will suffer far more than he will.

It is a measure of the decline of British politics that Davis's resignation has come in response not to the illness, but to the Government's prescription. The reason the state claims it needs the power to detain terrorist subjects for 42 days without charge is simple: according to the security services, there are several thousand jihadis resident in Britain, actively plotting mass murder.

This is not the slightest bit like the IRA's violence, which was entirely wrong but which did at least stem from the politics of Northern Ireland.

There was no easy way to escape that problem, so stringent measures of domestic security were warranted. But in the case of the jihadis, Britain, though a system of immigration and asylum which has totally failed to fulfil the state's most basic duty, that of protecting its citizens, has brought the problem on itself.

Media and government alike have accepted these failures with remarkable equanimity, while kicking up an enormous fuss over the Government's entirely inadequate response on its detention policy – inadequate, because the best 42 days of detention will do is to ensure that the bombers are punished. It will do nothing whatsoever to deter them, or to dissuade more extremists from entering the United Kingdom.

What is happening in Britain is also happening in the United States: the media, and the legislature, is losing its interest in holding an issue under a spotlight for months at a time, and so holding government
to account.

The quest for gotchas enables governments to pursue the policy of the quick fix. The result in Britain is both bad government and bad policy. If Davis's by-election can challenge the New Labourmedia model that has fed these failures, he will have done far more than his supportive constituents may realise.


Ted Bromund is director of International Security Studies at Yale University. The views expressed are his own.