IT WILL FALL TO THE TORIES TO FINISH TONY'S REVOLUTION:

Power to the people: the Conservatives stand for freedom, law and progress, and have it within their power to launch a decentralising, democratic revolution (Michael Gove, 10/02/04, The Spectator)

Most of my acquaintances have been extraordinarily encouraging about my decision to relinquish a journalistic career at the Times in the hope of being elected as the MP for Surrey Heath. But the father of one friend was perplexed. Sufficiently so to ask the question I least expected.

It wasn’t ‘Why have you done it?’ He could quite understand why someone would want to give up the frustrations of shouting on the sidelines and see if they could make any difference on the pitch. What he couldn’t understand was why I’d decided to stand as a Conservative.

Why indeed? I had thought it didn’t need explaining. He knew me well enough to know that I’d always been right-wing, didn’t he? He knew I was an Atlanticist who in a fight between George Bush and a tax-raising, terror-appeasing bundle of liberal prevarications was backing Bush all the way. He had often heard me protest that more centralised state control was part of the problem, not the solution, in education and health. And he knew that I found having to listen to the relentless left-wing bias of the Today programme an exquisitely painful duty, not unlike the whipping which members of Opus Dei are commanded to inflict on themselves. If that didn’t make me a Conservative, what did?

It was only as I reviewed each of these pieces of incontrovertible evidence of deep-dyed Toryism that I began to understand the mischievous power of my friend’s father’s question and, with it, the precise nature of the challenge we Conservatives face.

For in each of the cases I was inclined to bring up as proof of Conservative instincts, the father of my friend could argue that Tony Blair had appeared to be on the right-wing side of the argument and many Conservatives on the wrong. [...]

Before explaining here, as I did to my friend’s father, what makes me a Conservative, and what I believe will make the Conservatives a governing party again, I have to acknowledge that he had a point. The Conservatives have, in the past, exasperated their supporters and confused the rest of Britain by displaying a distressing lack of consistency. During the Nineties, in government, we forfeited the trust of the British people. Afterwards, in opposition, the party failed to stay true to promises of modernisation. Conservatives reached for hasty, hand-me-down expedients in an effort to secure an instant breakthrough in the polls, rather than sticking to a strategy for the long term.

It was the eventual decision to elect Michael Howard as leader that led me to believe that the party was ready to move on from its past mistakes. As home secretary, Howard was the one unalloyed Conservative success of the Nineties. And at the Home Office he showed a consistency under fire in pushing through Conservative principles, which is the precondition of success as a leader.

But what are those principles? Hasn’t everything for which the Tories once stood either been colonised by Blair or rendered marginal by the changes he has presided over? If New Labour now calls itself the party of business, the future, the universities, hard-working families, the Atlantic alliance, strong defence and no-holds-barred crime-fighting, what is left to us? Fox-hunting, Gibraltar and the House of Lords?

The first thing to say, of course, is that Labour’s attempt to appropriate natural Tory issues is an acknowledgment of the intrinsically conservative nature of England. Tony Blair recognises that no one can govern this country effectively who is seen as anti-enterprise, nostalgically tied to old ways of working, hostile to educational excellence, opposed to our most durable alliance, disinclined to stand up for Britain abroad and negligent of voters’ security.

Because Blair’s embrace of these positions is bogus, inauthentic, compromised, timorous, mechanical or half-hearted shouldn’t blind us to their importance. These are all issues where Conservatives should be seeking to establish superior claims to Labour rather than denying their importance and retreating to the positions Blair has left us.

I'm personally inclined to give Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt and to accept that he truly believes in the Third Way, as I'm inclined to believe that Bill Clinton knew that the future of his nation and therefore the best hope of his party lay in the New Democrat principles he espoused. However, Bill Clinton conspicuously failed to get his party to move as far Right as he ran in '92 and it's awfully hard to imagine that Tony Blair's successors will be able to keep Labour as far to the Right as he's moved it. The Tories then don'yt need to get to Mr. Blair's Right, which they probably can't do anyway, but they do nbeed to get as far Right as he is, so that when Labour starts drifting back the Conservatives can reclaim the ground that should be theirs, as George W. Bush has done here.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2004 11:00 PM