"The purpose of a political party is to win elections"

Nothing like the whole truth. And in some circumstances not at all.

Parties exist primarily to develop a vision of how a country could be better run, and to get other people to accept that vision as something desirable and possible. If some other party steals the ideas, and wins an election instead of some other guys, and puts them into practice, that's a victory.

In some ways it isn't so much that winning elections is what politcal,parties are about in the first place, you could almost say that it's a sad duty forced on them, as the only way to get the policies put into practice. Rather like a songwriter who is forced to sing the songs themselves, because no one else will sing them, or sing them right, anyway.

Of course ambitious politicians don't often see it that way, and that's one reason why noone should ever wholly trust them. And party activists can get sucked into thinking purely about how the home team can score, and that's why you get the kind of stuff we've been having from one of our nameless GUESTS who seems to have some difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. (True enough, there are some pretty unsavoury trees about, but...)