Edward Leigh's latest attack on Project Cameron will test unity of Cornerstone

FreeDictionary.com defines Don Quixote as "An impractical idealist bent on righting incorrigible wrongs."   Edward Leigh MP, quickly emerging as Mr Cameron's most outspoken critic from the Tory benches, has compared Project Cameron to Don Quixote's escapades.

Writing for the House Magazine, Mr Leigh lists the ways in which Mr Cameron has offended traditional Tory sensibilities:

"This is the year that Conservative spokesmen have:

• Adopted Aneurin Bevan as a role model (he who vowed to destroy us and described us as 'vermin';
• Praised left-wing Polly Toynbee's view of society;
• Snubbed the CBI;
• Pleaded understanding for marauding hoodies;
• Announced that we, not Labour, were the real defenders of an unreformed NHS, the last Soviet-style, centrally-controlled health service in any large country;
• Rejected tax cuts, despite the biggest tax hike in peacetime history;
• Criticised grammar schools;
• Turned down the volume on Euroscepticism to the inaudible."

While praising Mr Cameron's personal qualities the Chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee warns that the party is in danger of "taking our core vote for granted and in the process effectively disenfranchising millions of decent people who feel that none of the mainstream parties speak for them."  He continues:

"Our Euroscepticism is deliberately confused with crude nationalism, when in fact we want to help the Third World by breaking down trade barriers.  And why did the leader's speech at the party conference not mention immigration at all, when in the last few years we have undergone the greatest-ever wave of increasing immigration into our country?"

Part of the reason Edward Leigh is listened to is because of his leadership of the forty-strong Cornerstone group of Tory MPs.  The Cornerstone group is not necessarily united in its concerns about Project Cameron, however.  One member of the group resigned last week and Cornerstone's co-founder - John Hayes MP -  is known to be much more favourable to the party's direction.

Comments

[michael mcgough]

I spy a conservative!

[Blue Centre Forward]

I forecast further resignations from Cornerstone. There is no appetite amongst the parliamentary party for these kind of attacks on the Conservative leadership.

[TomTom]

Why is it so wrong for different groups to express opinions ? This is the essence of discussion - we used to have vibrant discussions in TV studios between politicians, and to have lively debate. Why is there this desire for Leninist rigidity in political parties ?

There was a time in 1950s, 1960s, 1970s when people argued their case in public before the Thought Police demanded obedience to The Party Line.

Had we had more open debate after the 1975 EEC Referendum and on matters such as Immigration - the country might not be the overwound spring of frustration it is today.

[Nikki C]

It's good to see that there are some true Conservatives left in the Parliamentary Party and that they are speaking out against the appalling madnesss that is going on at present.

I wonder if ordinary members can join Cornerstone. We the majority of ordinary Conservatives need to create a unified opposition to Cameron's activities.

What we need to say to this man is 'This far and no further'

If only Maggie were still well enough to intervene!

[Cranmer]

Cornerstone is itself a broad coalition. These comments should not cause resignations at all, not least because Mr Leigh was elected their leader because his views are broadly in tune with those of other members.

Of course he is entitled to voice his opinion - as Mr TomTom observes, it is only through discussion and disagreement that a Party moves forward. The last thing one wants, at a time when the Anglican Communion faces schism, is for Cornerstone to fracture into ineffectual denominations...

[Blue Centre Forward]

Do Cornerstone hold elections Cranmer? I suspect people have joined an organisation founded by Leigh and Hayes.

[Prentiz]

I think there's a rather dangerous difference between Cornerstones arguing within the party for their point of view, and this sort of public criticism, which can only benefit our opponents. Comments like "Snubbed the CBI and "Pleaded understanding for marauding hoodies" are downright disingenuous - effectively accepting the characterisation of Cameron's actions deployed by other parties.

There is certainly a case for the more conservative elements of the Conservative party to have a say - but that should take the form of rationale policy. This sort of ad hominem stuff actually undermines that case - making it easier to write off those who espouse it as cranks and nutters.

[Ted]

Mr Leigh obviously only browses the Sun & Mail from these comments and in publishing them only gives comfort to the Party's ebemies rather than openingg a debate -
Snubbed the CBI? DC went to Iraq rather than a speaking engagement, I'm supportive of that choice.
Praised Polly Toynbee? Used a single example from Toynbee of how to view relative poverty - agreed this was a change from Moore's views of the 80's and some still believe in a safety net for absolute poverty but it certainly wasn't praise as Polly recognised herself.
Pleaded for understanding of marauding hoodies? Gave a speech saying that we needed to understand the causes of such behaviour so we could reduce crime, while also supporting much more active action against and punishment of criminals.

[Perdix]

Total rubbish from Edward Leigh. A Tory said Polly had ONE good idea!Typical achievement of life-time socialists.

[Ted]

ebemies = enemies
openingg = opening
Shouldn't comment while on an audio-conference.... :-(

[michael mcgough]

"there is certainly a case for the more conservative elements of the Conservative party to have a say "

How magnanimous!

[Andrew Price]

If Edward Leigh Test is unhappy then Cameron is most definitely on the correct path in his quest to win over us floating voters in the 'sensible centre'.

[George Earle]

If Edward Leigh's House magazine article is put on the Cornerstone group's website it may reassure watchers thereof that this group of gallant 'Eurosceptics' is not totally moribund. The last press release there is dated 2/10/06.

[John Moss]

I would have more time for the so-called "traditional" conservatives if they actually campaigned for answers that are relevant today rather than being simply reactionary in calling for the restoration of the status quo ante.

Sweden has education vouchers, not grammar schools, Germany has a modern social health insurance system, not tax-relief for those escaping the state system. If we had both, together with reformed welfare, we could have as much "immigration" as the market would stand because anybody coming to this country would have no right to state welfare unless they paid in first.

I know some of the Cornerstone guys are in agreement with this kind of right-liberal agenda, but Leigh, particularly, seems bent on allowing the BBC to keep its "Tory Split Story" file open.

And this from a man who at Bournemouth in 2004 said that Blair wasn't all that bad!

[Justin Hinchcliffe]

I'm totally fed up with members - be they MPs or branch secretaries - that cannot say anything constructive about our Leader and the Party's direction. Let's unite and turn our fire on our real enemies: Labour and the Fib Dems.

[LeighforUKIP]

Nikki C - You need to leave the party if you want to oppose Cameron. There is no 'we' who want to stop Cameron.

Edward Leigh is a baffoon, just look at him, he sums up everything the public think is wrong about the Tory party, he's greasy, slimey, snotty nosed and comes across as arrogant and uncaring.

About time WE the true Conservatives stood up to this out of touch minority and defended the best leader we have had in years, the only one who has delivered us a consistant lead in the polls, made us look less nasty and actually set the agenda.

The Conservative Party is best when it is at its broadest, Disraeli knew that and so did Maggie for much of her reign. Extreme right wing dogma such as that which comes from Edward Leigh simply makes us look and sound like a nasty party that is anti everything and everyone. It's about time we started been pro some things too.

[ToMTom]

Germany has a modern social health insurance system,

Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! Now there is a man totally out of touch with Germany's current situation - maybe you should watch some sabine Christiansen and get to see what is actually happening........Germany is disappearing down the plughole and is turning into the GDR

[Thatcherite]

John Hayes, from his FCS days, has a reputation for dealing with the wets (at the expense of true Thatcherites) to further his personal ambitions. That led to him being known as one of the Shits. No change!

[Thatcherite]

John Moss should note that David Willetts has ruled out both grammar schools are education vouchers. He is another bogus "Thatcherite" who has sold out to the Wets to further his career.

[ToMTom]

Germany has a modern social health insurance system,

Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! Now there is a man totally out of touch with Germany's current situation - maybe you should watch some sabine Christiansen and get to see what is actually happening........Germany is disappearing down the plughole and is turning into the GDR

[matt wright]

I would have actually debated this seriously accept that Leigh lists slogans that the Labour party invented like the "Hug a Hoodie" nonsense that Cameron did not say. More often that not the "right" seem to talk themselves into a fury about things, that when you read Camerons speeches, he didn't say. Very strange,

Matt

[jorgen]

Wow, music to my ears: real Conservative policies!

[Andrew Young]

"Edward Leigh is a baffoon, just look at him, he sums up everything the public think is wrong about the Tory party, he's greasy, slimey, snotty nosed and comes across as arrogant and uncaring."

While personal attacks do not contribute to the debate, I do have to agree with you on this one.

[Thatcherite]

"greasy, slimey, snotty nosed and comes across as arrogant" - that's Old Etonian Dave to a T!

[jorgen]

Andrew, you may enjoy the personal attack on Leigh and I will admit that I have never agreed much with him in the past, but you forget that what he is putting forward is the groups opinion.

[Sean Fear]

I'm not entirely sure what a "baffoon" is but it sounds interesting.

Justin, you never cease to denigrate party members who don't share your left wing views, so I think you should follow your own advice.

[Scotty]

Timing of his article is interesting!

Just remind me which part of the Conservative party elected him spokesperson for the ordinary members, and does he believe in accepting the democratic choice of the membership or is that to be ignored?
So while the many foot soldiers are out campaigning for the party in the May elections he and his cabal are plotting and sniping to undermine the leadership in Westminster.
I have watched this happening in Scotland and it really is the most bl**dy frustrating and unappetizing spectacle.
And as for this comment ""taking our core vote for granted and in the process effectively disenfranchising millions of decent people who feel that none of the mainstream parties speak for them."
That is exactly what Edward Leigh and others within the Westminster party have been doing for years.
At the moment the conservative party gets paid to be the opposition to the government not each other!!!!

[malcolm]

Edward Leigh sometimes does his cause or the Cornerstone group no favours at all. This is one of those times. As other commentators have noted his comments re Toynbee, the CBI, and the NHS are disingenious in the extreme. The comment re Hoodies merely swallows Labour party spin hook line and sinker. What Leigh hopes to achieve is beyond me. Cornerstone would I think, do well to choose another spokesman.

[ukfirst]

Edward Leigh's crack about Cameron not even mentioning immigration at the conference is telling. Spin has replaced honesty.

[Og]

If Cameron's idea is for a broad tent, he has to keep people like Leigh reasonably happy. Not necessarily by adopting a Cornerstone manifesto, but by engaging the Tory right, recognising their complaints and telling them why he he does not wish to take (much of/any of) their advice and what he intends to do instead.

But because Cameron is contemptuous of the Right, a gulf has opened up. I fear that if we get to a hung parliament or small Tory majority, this will get very nasty indeed and make Major's problems with the "bastards" look like small fry.

It needn't have reached this stage. Had Cameron and Maude not overegged the Leftward rush to such an extent, the Right would be onside, UKIP would threaten very few Tories in marginal seats and we would be commanding 42% at least in the polls. My money is on Tory schism within 5 years. I thought EU would be the trigger, but there are plenty of other competing ideological breaking points, some of them appearing in the Leigh list at the top of this post.

[CDM]

Mr. Leigh appears to prefer the theatre of opposition to the business of government.

[Tam Large]

It shows how incredibly far the Party has moved to the left when people describe Edward Leigh's list above of affronts to moderate centre right core polices, as "extreme right-wing"!

As for "unite behind Dave" arguments: it is better that his less-cowed MPs warn him where he is going wrong, than have the voters do it in a couple of years' time. How many times do people like Mr Leigh have to remind that voters are sick of Blair politics, before it will sink in. The Blair route is a dead end - the voters have seen the emptiness of it, and want something better - Dave is giving them more Blair.

Madness.

[CDM]

The Right is on side! If it wasn't the Party would have lost 50,000+ members in the past few months, as well as 10% in the opinion polls.

Has it?

[Margaret on the Gullotine]

Cameron isn't contemptuous of the right, but if they spin the sort of unthought-out stuff that Leigh has said, then he might do so with justification.

Of course it is essential to have inter-party debate and Cornerstone has a role in that - but this sort of drivel isn't constructive and only helps the enemy. Time Leigh got his head screwed on.

[jorgen]

Og: My money is on Tory schism within 5 years. I thought EU would be the trigger

Yes. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The two parties can cooperate and will at each election compete to become the dominant group.
UKIP will also disappear.

And, Tam, I agree fully.

[CDM]

Let's not have any more facile comparisons of Cameron with Blair; if they were valid, why would we have a lead in the polls? Only Labour's core vote doesn't hate Blair now.

[Scotty]

"UKIP would threaten very few Tories in marginal seats and we would be commanding 42% at least in the polls."
Og, UKIP are not a threat to the party and never have been. This myth is part of the reason that we remained so low in the polls for many years and why after 3 GE defeats we still have less than 200 members.
If your suggestion had any basis of fact we would made the big jump in parliamentary seats and poll ratings back before the 2005' GE, and then fell back when Cameron was elected.
This claim about being at 42% in the polls had we followed your strategy is laughable.

[Martin Smith]

The Tombstoners are just like the whole party was pre-Cameron - the louder and shriller they shout, the less people tune in, so the louder and shriller they shout, and so the less....

[Richard Carey]

Regarding Leigh sounding off again: I stated when he said something similar last week how disappointing it was that he had to adopt this strident approach – I can only assume it is sheer arrogance that has led him to do it again. I hope that if he carries on in this vein, then behind the scenes he will be invited to a meeting with the Chief Whip – and I wouldn’t count on coffee. For any of our parliamentarians to be parroting Labour spin on the policies of the current leadership is beyond parody.

It is a shame, as Leigh’s evident venom at the Party’s current direction does his group no favours. I was most unhappy with the “recruiting sergeant for UKIP” coverage of their meetings at the last Party Conference, for example. While I don’t personally agree with a lot of the output from Cornerstone, they do have interesting things to say on some issues such as social justice that at least deserve to be part of the debate and would get a better hearing if Leigh & Co turned down the volume.

[malcolm]

Not sure why people like Tam Large and Michael Mcgough contribute to threads like this. They have left the party and support another party which if it does well will enable Labour to stay in power beyond the next election.Presumably they wish the Conservative party and its members nothing but ill which should be borne in mind when reading their posts.

[Alex Forsyth]

Amusing to see the Camerloons squealing with indignation at Edward's timely words. Possibly they haven't yet got over the weekend revelations about Cameron.

Edward speaks for Britain and he speaks for at least 80% of the Conservative Party. As I said previously it's time for an all-out battle with the Camerloons and things are beginning to shape up well.

Thatcherite, I do recall the unreliability of Hayes, although he is in many ways "one of us". Do you recall the famous song about a part of his anatomy sung to the tune "John Brown's Body"?

[CDM]

Surely members of other parties should not be allowed to post on a website that ostensibly speaks for the Tory grassroots?

[yogring]

Leighforukip made the comment that Edward Leigh's comments were extreme right wing. To be fair, everything Edward Leigh has said is entirely in tune with what Margaret Thatcher stood for. It was Mrs T that inspired me to be a Conservative. Many people say that what Cameron is doing, is "moving to the centre ground", and "recognising Britain as it is today". No, what Mr Cameron and his "modernisers" are doing is moving the party leftwards by becoming a social democratic party. Now if leighforukip is happy for that to happen, then he should call himself a big C, not a small c Conservative. For those of us small c conservatives who believed that Thatcherism was right for the time and is right for now, we will have to look elsewhere for our leadership, and for those big C Conservatives who see lower taxation, controlled immigration, law and order and any challenge to the Stalinist monolith that is the NHS as "extreme right wing", will be happy to take this country back to the 60's / 70's post war concensus. Cameron, Letwin and Maude are leading you down the garden path. What they are basically saying to you is that we weren't elected in the past three elections by being conservatives, so we will drop all our principles, call it modernisation, and become Blairite, purely to get into government, power for power's sake. Politics is extremely depressing in this country. Now that the Tories have become the SDP, there is no choice.

[CDM]

Mr. Forsytrh, could you give some evidence about Mr. Leigh's popularity, both in the party and the country at large?

[matt wright]

I agree with Richard, there are some useful things Cornerstone say but those views are totally lost in this ridiulous list that actually repeats Labour spin!

I know some on this site think I just blindly support Cameron actually I don't agree with everything he says but broadly agree with the approach. I am also anti-EU but share Redwoods view that there are those so obsessed with the issue that they are helping Labour and the EU rather than enabling us to tackle this.

I do think the party has to change. The shrill traditional message was not working and only serves to make a small core of people feel comfortable while frightening away many others. This is a paradox for the party but one we have to tackle if we are going to have a future. The world is not the same as when Thatcher came to power and we need new solutions for a new situation. On the streets now there is a lot of support from a fresh group of people that turned away from us in 1997, especially women.

I know that some of the old-style Conservatives find new ideas a bit threatening and maybe Cameron needs to re-double his efforts at explaining his approach. However the deliberate negativity, deliberate stirring and nasty personal posts from a growing minority on this site does not serve real debate and does not help the party move forward and it is sad that the Editor has allowed the site to degenerate so much. The truth is that this elemnt do not want rational debate about taking the party forward but actually want to destroy the party (as some actually have the honesty to admit).

Matt

[Will]

Didn't the majority of Cornerstone vote for Cameron ?

Leigh also backed Heseltine in 1990, so he doesn't have the best track record.

They got what they voted for, so no use them complaining now.

[Richard Carey]

As I said previously it's time for an all-out battle with the Camerloons and things are beginning to shape up well.

That's strange, Alex - I thought it was time for an all-out battle to capture some council seats in May from Labour and the LibDems.

But then you and I seem to have different priorities.

Surely members of other parties should not be allowed to post on a website that ostensibly speaks for the Tory grassroots?

While I sometimes worry about opposition contributors on here being quoted out of context in the MSM, I think the wonder of blogging is that you can post on here and be an idiot. But if you do, you should be prepared for six other people to shoot you down and tell you exactly why you're an idiot. Hopefully debate self-regulates itself like this, and we come out stronger for it - anything more, past the point that it breaks the comment guidelines, is obviously dealt with by the Editor.

[Alex Forsyth]

Surely members of other parties should not be allowed to post on a website that ostensibly speaks for the Tory grassroots?

Very inclusive, CDM, and very democratic if I may say so.

Almost as democratic as "Malcolm" (presumably not his real name) who suggested that I should be thrown out of the party for daring to criticise Cameron, or perhaps more pertinently for arguing with "Malcolm" the Magnificent.

I daresay I've been a member of the party a lot longer than these whinging specimens and have worked harder for it than any of them. "Tory" leftists have a well-earned reputation for sitting on their backsides and expecting everybody else to do the work.

The "Tory" left now emerge as a tiny and frightened fraction of the British population, terrified that Cameron's wafer-thin lead will vanish like a morning mist, which I don't doubt it will when Brown takes over.

When Thatcher ruled, we radical Thatcherites walked tall. Since the disaster years of the contemptible Major the Tory Party has become a stage for political dwarfs, laughable anoraks who are the butt of every joke going. These gutless leftist fools have destroyed our party.

We need a party of pride, vision and ambition. A party that can rise above the filthy mess that is Britain today and create a Britain that is great again.

The morally bankrupt puppets who post here in support of Cameroon offer a one-way ticket to ruin.

[CDM]

Perhaps he never ventures outside Royal Tunbridge Wells, but Mr. Forsyth is very wrong if he thinks constant invocations of the Blessed Margaret is going to win us another election.

He also claims to have worked "harder" for the party than any of the "gutless leftist fools". It obviously wasn't hard enough, or we wouldn't have been thumped in 97, 01 and 05.

[Richard Carey]

I daresay I've been a member of the party a lot longer than these whinging specimens and have worked harder for it than any of them.

In that case, Alex, you should be adult enough to take a deep breath and calm down. The manner in which you're posting is doing none of us any favours at the moment and is not helping get your argument across.