As Pat Robertson's 1988 run for president of the United States wore on, news reports began to surface of some of the then little-known televangelist's more colourful public statements, including his claim to have diverted a hurricane from flattening his studios near the coast of Virginia by a timely intervention with the Almighty. Pundits wondered whether the widespread mockery to which these reports gave rise -- he also claimed the power to cure haemorrhoids through prayer -- would hurt him at the polls. The consensus was that it would not: If you were even considering voting for Mr. Robertson, chances were you didn't put "a firm grasp of reality" high on your list of requirements in the first place.

Which brings me to last weekend's convention of federal Conservatives. Media hacks might wonder at the prospect of a party that is $7-million in debt, that has perhaps 20,000 members, that barely registers in double digits in the polls, and that is losing MPs and organizers by the day, carrying on as if it were a government in waiting. They might be even more puzzled at the adoration heaped upon the party's hapless leader, even as this spectacular implosion, for which he must bear at least some responsibility, continues. But that is to reckon without the peculiar belief systems of the modern Progressive Conservative. Sure, they're behaving irrationally. But if they were rational, they wouldn't be Tories.

Membership in the Tory party today is not so much an affiliation as a psychosis. What can you say about a party that gives every sign of having turned into a personality cult, except to note that the "personality" in question is that of Joe Clark? I don't want to make this personal. But Mr. Clark's whole appeal, since he returned to public life, has been essentially personal.

Did he not tell last year's party conference, in weirdly messianic tones, "I have come back to make this country whole"? Has he not made himself the issue, time and time again: assuring party faithful that his personal standing with the voters would see them through; committing the party to contentious policy stands, such as opposition to the Clarity Act, by his own swift dictate; complaining of being the target of a campaign of vilification by his political rivals -- a campaign that seems to exist largely in his own head?

If a party with two seats west of Montreal can claim, apparently on the basis of a sincere belief, to be a "national" party, all things are possible. Consider the party's new platform, which pledges that "a Progressive Conservative government" would pay off the entire national debt in 25 years, even as it is cutting taxes by $105-billion over five and spending billions more on everything from health care to farmers to employment insurance.

To pay off $577-billion in debt by 2025 would require an average annual surplus of $23- billion, or about eight times last year's $3-billion. If you did not cut taxes at all, you might see a surplus that large in five years -- assuming no real increase in spending and uninterrupted economic growth. But if taxes are to be cut as deeply as the Tories imagine -- God knows what sort of hole the party's promise to abolish the capital gains tax on personal income would blow in the public accounts -- it is simply not possible to reconcile these ambitions.

But then, Toryism has never been about intellectual consistency, most especially among that strange mutation, now the dominant strain in the party, known as Red Tories. The Red Tory, as the name implies, does not go in much for logical coherence or philosophical frameworks; indeed he prides himself on it. He is guided, rather, by sentiment, and nostalgia, and an unshakeable conviction that everything can be resolved through "dialogue."

Which is not to say that the Red Tory does not believe in anything. He does. He believes in the Queen, and good diction, and the proper teaching of Canadian history in the schools. His heroes are George Grant, Disraeli, and Allan Bloom. He goes to church, militantly. He has a quite mystic regard for notions like "community," though he does not know what he means by it, or how it conflicts with the "individualism" he despises. He is also against "socialism," though again he can't say why.

Above all, he believes in civility -- unlike his political opponents, whom he curses in the most strident terms. In general, the rule is: the less the ideological differences, the greater the hostility. So although the Red Tory hates the Canadian Alliance, he loathes the Liberals more, and fellow Tories most of all -- until, in the enduring enmity between those two indistinguishably Red Tories, Mr. Clark and Hugh Segal, the rancour reaches molten form.

So of course the Tories will carry on. Not because there is any need for them. Not because they have any chance of forming a government. Not, indeed, because they have much chance of anything. They will survive, rather, on a diet of vanity and self-delusion, serene in the expectation that one day the public will come back to them, that the storm will blow over, that this too shall pass.