CURLY WOULD HAVE A BETTER SHOT AT AN ENDORSEMENT (via Daniel Merriman):

Why Bush won’t back Howard (Fraser Nelson, 2/19/05, The Spectator)

Tories who maintain their own Republican contacts are in no doubt about the scale of the crisis. ‘Personal loyalty matters to President Bush above all other things, even party politics,’ says one senior Tory MP, well connected in Washington. ‘That’s how he works, that’s his foreign policy and it has served him well. So he takes loyalty very seriously. At the moment, I’d say relations now between our two parties are at their lowest ebb since Suez.’ And by no means all Conservatives are distraught. Several Tory MPs spent last year admiring John F. Kerry — as George Osborne, the Tory’s shadow treasury secretary, explained in this magazine a year ago. ‘It pains me to report,’ he wrote, ‘that we Bushites are a minority.’

This rift, ironically, has opened at a time when British conservatism is at a new peak of influence in the White House. After revolutionising America’s foreign policy, the Bush administration is using 1980s Britain as a blueprint for a domestic revolution. The White House’s ‘ownership society’ agenda is explicitly modelled on the Thatcher government’s policies with council houses in the 1980s: use ownership to transform people’s lives and mindsets. The aim is to move from state-dependency to empowerment.

The White House wants to sprinkle this magic on US social security: allowing workers to control part of their personal pension investments, rather than have retirement funds managed by the state. Thatcherism has never been more fashionable. [...]

To explain his ‘ownership society’, Rove then quoted extracts from a book, The Anatomy of Thatcherism by the late Shirley Robin Letwin, mother of the shadow chancellor. This obscure 1992 academic book is now at the heart of White House thinking on reform. ‘The Thatcherite argues that being one’s own master — in the sense of owning one’s own home or disposing of one’s own property — provides an incentive to think differently about the world,’ he read. ‘The Thatcherite, whilst not believing that patterns of ownership absolutely determine people’s moral attitudes, nevertheless stresses that the two are connected, and sees in wider individual ownership a means of promoting moral attitudes Thatcherism seeks to cultivate.’

What fascinates Rove is what Letwin calls ‘vigorous virtues’ — patterns of behaviour unleashed by the status of ownership. This idea, captured by Letwin and enacted by Thatcher, is what Rove believes will ‘recast the domestic political debate’ in America.

This was not a show laid on for the Brits. In a recent speech to another Washington think-tank, Rove directed them to the same source. ‘The closest analogy to what President Bush is attempting to do with his emphasis on an “ownership society” may be found in the policies of Margaret Thatcher,’ he said.

That British conservatism can be so popular in the White House while the British Conservatives are so unpopular shows how detached the two have become in the American mind. The Tories are no longer seen as guardians of the Thatcherite flame. The White House remains keen to welcome people like Mark Worthington, Baroness Thatcher’s private secretary, who was received in Washington in December. But the Conservative party is slipping off the Republican radar.

‘We’re aware of British think-tanks like the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs,’ says Grover Norquist, an influential free-market activist in Washington. But today’s Tory party, he says, makes far less impact. Britain’s general election will make ‘half a day’s news’ in America: ‘It’s not as if he’s going to lose to a left-wing party that will pull out of Iraq.’ And as long as Blair remains in power, he will shine so brightly in America that the Tories remain invisible.

British conservatism is at a new peak of influence in Britain too.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 18, 2005 4:28 PM