By Tim Montgomerie
Over recent years the American artist Krieg Barrie has produced a number of drawings for ConservativeHome. We've brought some of them together below (you can click on any of them to enlarge them and inspect in closer detail):
The shields in the ConservativeHome masthead (fully explained here) represent the breadth of the conservative coalition:
The ConservativeHome shields aimed to present a vision of a broad party, welcoming of economic, social and internationalist conservatives - not, perhaps, always agreeing but working together. When ConHome launched four years ago we worried that the Conservative Party was too narrow. The image below of a man trapped in a dark room, constantly recycling the same four messages was where the party seemed trapped:
ConHome was conceived at the same time as the
Centre for Social Justice. When Iain Duncan Smith lost the Tory leadership they were the two projects I focused on. I only stayed with the CSJ for its first year. IDS, Cameron Watt and Philippa Stroud did all the hard work but the vision of the CSJ has always been important to ConservativeHome. This image that first appeared in the book
There Is Such A Thing As Society signals the core CSJ belief that children need much more than money from the state to flourish:
This is one of my favourite Barrie drawings. Do click on it to see in full. European leaders are sat at a table bedecked with the EU flag, eating cheese and drinking red wine, looking inwards. At their side a hungry child begs for food and a terrorist plots.
Another ConHome concern belief is in American exceptionalism. A survey for the AmericaInTheWorld.com website found that much anti-Americanism is profoundly ignorant.
The image below appears on the top of the CentreRight site. It captures ConservativeHome's belief in the power of the internet. The new media has already broken the monopoly of comment and has subjected big media, big business and big politics to increasing scrutiny. But the revolution has only just started...
