This year's gripping Presidential election caused me to turn to my much-thumbed copy of Micklethwait & Wooldridge's The Right Nation: Why America is Different, which came out in time for the last election (the date on the Amazon page is in reference to the new, revised, post-election edition). It is a superb book, full of insight and thought, with great analysis not only of longer term trends and movements but also of the Presidency (and candidacy) of George W Bush - I only wish that something like it came out prior to every US Presidential election.
Anyway, tucked inside it was a copy of this article by the same authors: From Washington with Love: tips for hopeful Tories. It's from 2005 - 3 years on, looking back at the tips is very interesting.
Read the whole thing as each suggestion is provided with a breakdown, but the tips given in 2005 were:
- Plan for the long term.
- Invest in ideas.
- Use those ideas to create some clear blue water between yourselves and the lefties.
- Use your councils.
- Wage a culture war.
- Rebrand your party.
- Start building infrastructure - both inside the party and outside.
HOW DO YOU THINK WE'VE DONE ON THOSE TIPS?
NB: the online version of the article lacks the following introduction, rather denying it the jesting tone it's meant to have; In 2002, a floppy disk from Republican headquarters was found in a Washington park showing how Karl Rove, George Bush's Svengali, planned to win the election. It turned out to be prophetic. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, whose book on the American right has been distributed around the White House by Rove, have discovered a similar disk that he left behind in the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool at the end of the Tory Party conference...