Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron.
Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Proposing the motion, Simon Heffer surprised everyone by launching into a warm tribute to Ted Heath. ‘A serious talent’, Heath had been hobbled by a ‘terrible desire to let the state take control’. In office he demonstrated a fatal ‘flexibility of principle’. Heffer worried that Cameron had the same predilection for followership not leadership. ‘I want a Conservative victory,’ said the Heff, ‘but do I want a victory with these Conservatives?’
Bruce Anderson opened with a pre-emptive attack on Peter Hitchens, accusing him of ‘sectarian fanaticism’. The account Hitchens has given of the present Tory party comes ‘straight from his bile-duct’. Anderson then looked back on his own long and meandering political route-march. Forty years ago he’d been a Marxist. By 1979 he was a Tory wet. Nowadays he’s a committed Cameroon and he heaped praise on his protégé. ‘A tough and stubborn man with excellent mental stamina.’ He extolled Cameron as the first Tory leader to speak out about the demoralised underclass.
Peter Hitchens replied with a similar confession about his past. ‘I was a much better Marxist then than [Anderson] is a Conservative now.’ He mocked the Labour administration as a ‘pro-crime, anti-education, Murdoch-run government’ which offered ‘insane subsidies to fatherless families’. As a former Labour insider, he was dismayed to see the nation being run by ‘ex-Trotskyists who have never confronted their past’. Hitchens couldn’t resist a dig at the EU, in particular the Hague doctrine, ‘in Europe but not run by Europe’. ‘That’s like saying I’m in Wormwood Scrubs but not run by Wormwood Scrubs.’
Tim Montgomerie, editor of ConservativeHome.com, called his opponents ‘cold and timid souls’. He urged the Tories to unite against a Labour government which had left ‘parts of the economy Sovietised’. If Brown were given four more years, ‘the chances of a Thatcherite government being elected again would be gone for good’.
Kelvin MacKenzie, cracking the best jokes of the evening, brandished his battle scars and claimed that the Sun’s campaign to deny Labour power in 1992 had been insufficiently rewarded. ‘I kept the Welsh windbag out of office and I didn’t receive a bloody Dinky toy.’ He complained that the Conservative message was like an ill-tuned radio. ‘It’s not getting across.’ Electing Cameron was a matter of national survival. ‘One more term of Brown and we’ll be twinned with North Korea.’
Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next, hoped Cameron wouldn’t adopt Mrs Thatcher’s combative approach to politics. ‘We don’t want someone who turns up at the negotiating table with a helmet and a baseball bat.’ Cameron would arrive ‘with a smile’. He praised Dave for transforming the party and making the Conservatives electable by taking on his own supporters.
The best floor speech came from a female Tory activist who argued that the motion’s proposers were undermining Cameron at the very moment when solidarity was essential to victory. Not so, said Peter Hitchens. ‘I think of my country first and this Conservative party is a long way from my country.’ It would be folly to postpone the discussion till after the election. ‘Within two years you’ll be cursing the next government just as you curse this one.’ Cameron’s only interest, said Hitchens, is in attaining power. He’s worse than Heath and Thatcher. Worse than Brown, even. ‘He’s Blair.’ The motion was defeated.
Votes before: For 175, Against, 89, Undecided, 183
Votes after: For 154, Against 290, Undecided, 7