THE VERY VISION OF A MODERN TORY

My hero: David Cameron, the young Tory MP, has all the qualities needed to rescue the party (Bruce Anderson, 7/26/03, The Spectator)

In his political views, David Cameron is on the real-world Right of the Tory party. A Eurosceptic, he believes in smaller government and personal freedom; he abominates political correctness and the nanny state. But he also understands that most people depend on public services and do not necessarily trust the Tories to look after them. David Cameron is a modern Tory, who sees the need to adapt old principles to new circumstances. Without being a populist, he has a feel for public opinion. He likes pop music as well as opera; football as well as deer-stalking.

Above all, he has a robust and incisive mind. I have rarely met a politician who can expand a complex issue with such clarity while spotting every political nuance. He is also a good speaker, who charms audiences without condescending to them and who makes jokes while remaining serious.

If there is a fault, it is an unconcealed impatience. One or two of David Cameron's Tory contemporaries, not negligible figures themselves, have complained that he does not take enough trouble with the likes of them. In the febrile world of competitive politics there may be an element of jealousy in that criticism, but it is something which he will have to watch. The day will come when he needs his fellow Tory MPs' votes.

At this point, any Tory who's actually more conservative than Tony Blair is a hopeful sign.


MORE:
It's time to fight back: Now we're told the Tories are even responsible for making more people commit suicide (David Cameron, September 20, 2002, The Guardian)

A column in the Guardian might be the wrong place to ask this question. But does anybody out there ever feel sorry for us Tories? We may be in our fifth year of opposition, languishing in the polls and virtually invisible in the media, but we're still getting blamed for everything. And I mean, everything. The state of the railways. Privatisation. Hospital waiting lists. Two decades of under-investment. Shortage of housing. The Tory sale of council houses. When will anyone start blaming the government?

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, an academic study is showing that the suicide rate tends to rise during Tory governments. No, seriously. According to the study, if Labour or the Liberals had ruled uninterrupted this century, 35,000 fewer people would have died. [...]

But I think I have the key. On election night in 1997, when I crashed and burned as the Tory candidate in Stafford, an old lady came to me in tears and said: "I don't want to die under a Labour government." Perhaps there were thousands of others like her who didn't wait for the final results and took pre-emptive action.

Another look at the figures over the past century would seem to back up this thesis. There was a spike in the figures just before the first Labour government in 1924 and another in 1945. Churchill may not have expected the Labour landslide, but others clearly did.

The figures were relatively flat during Ted Heath's premiership, presumably on the basis that people thought (quite rightly as it turned out) that a Labour government couldn't be much worse. On this basis, the rise in the early 1980s wasn't down to Margaret Thatcher's tough policies, but simply because, before the Falklands war, people couldn't see how she could win another election.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2003 9:27 PM