RONALD REAGAN’S Eleventh Commandment famously ordered his party: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

For ambitious and bitchy politicians, it was always a demanding precept and in practice they have obeyed it about as assiduously as they’ve kept the seventh (or for that matter the sixth) of the decalogue of Moses. But the great unwieldy and shifting coalition of the Republican Party has somehow managed to hold itself together rather better than the infamously feuding Democrats, whose favourite form of assembly has long been the circular firing squad.

Not any more. Republicans are falling out among themselves like the starving Israelites in the desert. The political din in Washington is dominated by members of the ruling party shouting at each other. Just this week you could have heard it across town everywhere Republicans were gathered. At the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, was Bruce Bartlett, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, explaining to a large and sympathetic audience why his criticism of President Bush’s economic policies had led him to be fired from a conservative research institute. In the pages of conservative journals a furious fight among neoconservatives was sparked by the apostasy of Francis Fukuyama. In a new book, the man who declared the End of History has denounced the Iraq war and his erstwhile neocon friends who supported it.

And up on Capitol Hill the loudest noise of all came from Republican members of Congress rushing to distance themselves from President Bush. They ignored Mr Bush’s pleas not to reject the transfer of half a dozen US ports to a company owned by the Dubai Government and in the process sent warning that they have passed the point where loyalty to the President was compatible with their own electoral success.

These skirmishes are part of a broader war now raging within the Republican Party. In its ferocity this internecine strife is worse than anything seen in Washington since the first Bush Administration ended so disastrously in 1992. Traditional conservatives are bashing neoconservatives; free-market Republicans are attacking big business Republicans; fiscal conservative are furious with big-spending conservatives; national security, America-first Republicans are in open warfare with free-trading, open-immigration Republicans.

The obvious reason is that the party is in a slump in electoral fortunes. Nothing loosens the ties of loyalty like the prospect of losing power. After a brief and tepid recovery at the start of the year, President Bush’s approval ratings are back in the 30s. Almost two thirds of Americans think their country is on the wrong track. Republicans in Congress are about as popular as Asian ducks on a chicken farm.

The disparate and proximate causes of the Republican implosion are obvious: Iraq, first and foremost; the continuing slow response to Hurricane Katrina (bewilderingly, most of the money that Congress authorised for reconstruction has still not got anywhere near New Orleans); a growing tide of corruption scandals; and, most recently, the Dubai ports debacle.

A run of events like this would make even the most loyal of partisans feel just a little fractious. But the deeper reason for Republican unease is that linking these apparently unconnected disasters is a common thread: a suggestion that Republicans have lost quite a bit of their soul.

In Congress the party has presided over the biggest increase in the federal government since Lyndon Johnson. The Clinton Administration and previous Democrat-controlled congresses were niggardly by comparison. Doubts about Iraq have set in not just about the conduct of the war but over the very idea behind the effort in the first place. Conservatives who have always harboured deep suspicions about the wisdom of government getting involved in people’s lives are scratching their heads as to how they could have signed on to a project that has the US Government trying to remake an entire region of the world.

The corruption scandals also demonstrate how far Republicans have wandered from their faith. Supposedly conservative politicians have grown to enjoy the pleasures of office, and have become even more zealous than the Democrats in protecting them.

If Iraq shows what happens when conservatives go wrong abroad, Katrina illustrates the disasters they can produce at home. Michael Brown, the infamous head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was not the only political hack with no experience of or real interest in government to be put in charge of a vast government bureaucracy. He just happened to be one who was found out. The Dubai ports sale farrago has even undermined the Bush Administration’s reputation for keeping the nation secure from external threats.

When it comes to spending money, waging “nation building” wars or responding to natural disasters, putting Republicans in charge of an expanding government is like putting teetotalers in charge of a brewery — you shouldn’t really be surprised if things don’t work out as you might hope.

The conventional wisdom in Washington as the November mid-term elections approach is that the Republicans are in serious but not catastrophic trouble; that thanks to the vicissitudes of the electoral arithmetic and a Democratic Party that can outdo the Republicans in every category for ineptitude, the expectation is that the party will hold on to its control of congress with a slimmed-down majority.

But that might be even worse news for the Republicans. Holding on to power in Congress by a slim margin for the last two years of an unpopular President’s term might just set the stage for a genuine disaster in the much more important presidential and congressional elections of 2008.

To reinvigorate their own fortunes, a growing number of Republicans are secretly hoping the Democrats get a chance to screw things up for a change.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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