Poor Lord Saatchi

...Well, not that poor obviously, but nevertheless rather hard done by. He must have hoped that his CPS pamphlet on the future of the Conservative Party would have served to stir up debate. Instead it has elicited a chorus of derision.

Tuesday’s Times editorial was particularly cruel, even poking fun at his lordship’s outsize specs. To some extent Saatchi is the author of his misfortune. His ostentatious mea culpa for the election defeat was a thinly veiled j’accuse aimed at all around him, including Michael Howard: “I do blame myself for not preventing them doing certain things.” It would have sounded better if he’d simply said: “I wasn’t in any position to prevent them from doing anything. The fact is I was pretty much sidelined. Maybe I should have resigned, but at least I witnessed the car crash at close quarters and can give you an accurate description. Who knows, someone might take notice and do things differently next time.”

That would have set up subsequent analysis quite nicely – which, by the way, is well worth reading...

Comments

[James Hellyer]

Poor Lord Saatchi indeed! The opening chapter of his pamphlet may be bizarre in its presentation, but like the rest of pamphlet contains much sense.

Generally I agreed with most of what Lord Saatchi said. I think a party with a clear vision of a better Britain, and the confidence to articulate how its policies will achieve that, is infinitely preferrable to a pragmatic or triangulated party.

[Paul Marks]

Agreed.

"Pragmatic" just means going along with whatever the Guardian letters page says should be policy.

As Lady Thatcher pointed out, self described "One Nation" Conservatives tend to hold that there are two nations ("the rich" and "the poor") and that different policies favor these two nations. Contrary to Dizzy this is just not so.

Lady Thatcher (and, I would argue, all of us)tried to follow the belief of Edmund Burke that a policy of allowing civil interaction (limiting state action as much as we can) is to the long term benefit of the nation as a whole.

In practice we may be able to reduce the size and scope of government very little, but if we do not even try to do this then there is no point in having a Conservative party.

There are plenty of political parties following the B.B.C. style "centre ground" of ever more government spending and regulations (Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh Nationalists......) there is no need for another party to further this line. Nor will voters who support this line vote Conservative. All we will achieve by trying to follow the "centre ground" of "One Nationism" (really two nationism) is make natural Conservatives stay at home.

[James Hellyer]

I really can't undestand the obsession with the centre ground. It's just the middlepoint between two parties. All moving towards it does is move it ever closer to the opposition. THe quest for it inevitably means that parties sell out their beliefs in the name of pragmatism, and you end up with a 70s style choice between ineffictive, statist Conservatives and ineffective, statist Labour governments.