Andreas Whittam Smith: The Sixties claims its last victim - the Conservative Party

The key point about Conservative Party members is that when most of them were young adults, the 1960s hadn't yet happened. Indeed, I believe the gradual extinction of the traditional Tory tribe is a late consequence of the social changes which got under way at that time.

I share one characteristic with the typical Conservative Party member. I am the same age. As a result, we have this experience in common: in the second half of the 1960s, when we were married and bringing up families, lots of things we had assumed to be as firmly rooted as great oaks began to be cut down. Old land marks disappeared

For me, ever since those years, there has been a palpable "before" and "after", just as it is obvious that Britain was a different place "before the war" as compared with "after the war". Judging by their average age of 64 years, Conservative Party members mostly belong to the "before the 1960s" generation.

Before what, exactly? Before the contraceptive pill, before women had careers rather than jobs and before feminism. Before divorce rates began to soar, before couples with children omitted to get married, before single parent families grew more numerous. Before civil rights movements, before the big expansion in universities, before student protest and before marathon mass meetings when anybody could get up and say the craziest things. Before immigrants from the old Empire arrived in large numbers. Before drugs, before Beat poetry, before psychedelic mind expansion, before pop music, before rock and roll, before tie-dyed clothes, long hair and women going bra-less.

How I spent my late teens and early 20s, which took place before this revolution in social behaviour, would be familiar to Conservative Party members. I did two years of national service. The army to which I belonged in the middle 1950s was essentially the same institution which had fought the Second World War. I served with the Cheshires; in its private language, the regiment still retained words borrowed from Hindi and from Arabic, reflecting pre-war service overseas. It remained an army designed to patrol an empire.

At Oxford from 1957 to 1960 there wasn't a sign of the impending upheaval. We were respectful of our parents and deferential towards authority. I went to "coming out" dances; some of my girlfriends were debutantes. Persisting with my exploration of Olde England, after Oxford I went to work for Rothschilds in the City. It was the last of the merchant banking partnerships; it was not possible to become a partner unless you were a member of the family. The building in St Swithin's Lane was a Victorian counting house, panelled extensively in mahogany. My rank was that of clerk. I had to wear white shirts with stiff collars and address everybody as "sir".

The 1960s really began in 1963 when the first Beatles albums appeared and Private Eye was founded. I was by then 26. I went off into journalism and got married the following year. My familiar world was about to be turned upside down.

I didn't join the Conservative Party. Quite a few of those who became members 30 years or more ago did so because they wished to conserve the old hierarchy, to keep the old relationships and show and receive the old respect. For the former social system had this clear advantage – everybody knew where they fitted in, even if they didn't like it. It was settled. Alas, to preserve the status quo by joining a political party turned out to be a vain hope. Successive Conservative governments could no more stop the social changes engendered in the 1960s than parents today can keep their children from using mobile phones.

As the last cohort of Conservatives brought up before the 1960s has grown older, however, it hasn't willingly come to terms with the changes. These people disapprove of gays. They deplore single-parent families. They hate multiculturalism. In other words, this pre-1960s generation wants history wound back to where it was in 1960 and given another turn – to see if it comes out better this time. They haven't accepted the social revolution. They are like the last supporters of the Stuarts after the Hanoverians have been on the throne for 30 years, or Catholics who want to bring back the Latin mass. Their views have no resonance with younger generations. Their children don't agree. They are the last of a kind. There won't be Conservative members with their attitudes ever again.

There will, of course, always be conservatives, and lots of them. But small c conservatives under 55 have no sense of a lost age, nor a feeling that the clock should be turned back, nor that there was once a "before" and that they are stuck in the "after". And as they grow older, they won't become carbon copies of the present membership, the 300,000 who must cast their votes for Kenneth Clarke or Iain Duncan Smith.

In due course, these younger conservatives will make a political party in their own image. I am not even sure what it will be called.

aws@globalnet.co.uk