ConservativeHome's Columnists

This section of ConservativeHome.com has now closed

14th January: It has been replaced by CentreRight.com; thirty or so writers blogging short and longer pieces 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Louise Bagshawe: In praise of Margaret Thatcher

I want to thank Tim Montgomerie and Sam Coates for the opportunity they gave me to write a column for ConHome this year. Partly, this chance was afforded me because Tim knows I have been a Cameroon voice on the site for some time, under both my own name and pseudonyms, and because the editors wish to recognise Conservatives who represent the full range of party opinion. But in considering myself a Cameroon, I remain, as I have always been, a Thatcherite. When submitting myself for selection I was lucky enough to be able to include quotes from friends who had known me since university, and who could attest to my profound hero worship of the greatest woman statesman. I am in an odd position; in that I have a number of friends from political families, I have several acquaintances who know Lady Thatcher socially. I can not, and likely will never, make that boast. I do not know Lady Thatcher. But politically, I worship her. I never had any doubt as to how my column on Conservative Home should end. Posters on this site should not worry when the media spins to them that Cameroon, modern compassionate Conservative MPs and candidates, want to distance themselves from Lady Thatcher. This is nonsense; I do not wish to distance myself. I wish instead merely to touch the hem of her garment.

How can I express my gratitude to the greatest living Conservative and politician? I was born in 1971, born when my father was forced by punitive taxation to look at emigrating, and persuaded against it by my mother on the grounds that walks in the English countryside were always free. I was born into a world where strike-ridden Britain was perceived to be in permanent decline. I was born into a world where the idea of social justice was capitulation to the unions and pacifism abroad even in the face of aggression. I was born into a world where over-employment seemed a fact of life and the Foreign Office was telling the PM her job was to “manage Britain’s decline”. BM (Before Margaret) we were taking loans from the IMF, like the proverbial banana republic. We were a charity case, an afterthought. We were quite simply losers.

Graeme Archer's Diary: Love, Actually

There’s a place for us. Somewhere, a place. For us. Hold my hand.

*
Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there. So, Saturday night, and like a few million others we’re agog at the X-factor final. I’m watching a nice young man from Wales singing a song from West Side Story, a song I’ve always been aware of, vaguely, without really, you know, focusing on it, and suddenly it transports me. It pierces me; whatever carapace I wear to get through life is pierced, is torn asunder, and I’m sat there with tears streaming down my face. Fully clothed and completely naked. George Orwell wrote about this, didn’t he, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The potency of sentimental music.

*
Love, Actually was the name of the Richard Curtis film, which I gleefully nicked for the name of the first Platform piece which Tim kindly printed of mine. This is the last Column (didn’t you know?) [I told you not to mention that, and to write about politics, just for once – Ed] so I’ve re-nicked the title and, of course, the subject matter: the only “political” thing I really care about.

*
There have been twenty-six young people murdered so far this year in London. So far. That unconscious addition of “so far” is a telling example of Londoners’ expectations about crime. Not that it matters what time of year it is, but I find that the near-coincidence of the current death-toll with the countdown to Christmas has brought the horror home to me. Twenty-six families across London facing Christmas without their child.

Meantime we still have a Met chief who presided over the fatal shooting of an innocent Londoner on a tube train, but who refuses to take any institutional responsibility for it. Great message. Blair, of course, is kept in place by the Labour mayor, some of whose other cronies, we are now discovering (courtesy of some remarkable journalism from Andrew Gilligan in the Standard) appear to have siphoned of hundreds of thousands of pounds that were intended to give young people some sort of life-opportunity more attractive than street-crime. If the allegations against Livingstone’s cronies are proved (and there have been no convincing denials from his office) then there will be a direct line to be drawn: from the corruption over which he is accused of presiding, to the failure to empower local communities, to the ever-increasing cohort of dead London youth.

My fondest New Year political wish: a turbo-charged campaign from Boris. We don’t just need to defeat Livingstone in May: we need to chase him from office, covered in opprobrium.  Catharsis required.

Cameron Watt: Five for the future

After a rollercoaster of a political year, Conservatives end 2007 in good cheer. Cameron continues to grow in stature and has established a healthy lead in the polls. By contrast, Brown’s bottling and balls-ups may have inflicted irreparable damage to the Prime Minister’s reputation and, ultimately, his prospects of winning a General Election.

With such a disillusioned and volatile electorate, even the most encouraging polling numbers leave no room for complacency among Conservatives. Looking ahead, what gives me greatest confidence for British democracy in general, and Conservative fortunes in particular, is the quality of people committed to serving in politics.

Of course there are many exceptional individuals serving already on the Conservative green benches. Their ranks will surely be swelled significantly after the next election from the impressive cohort of parliamentary candidates already selected. In my final column of the year, I hope you’ll indulge me in briefly highlighting (in alphabetical order) five exceptional people I hope and expect to make a major contribution to our party’s future. They are engaging personalities and high achievers who are excellent ambassadors for a modern, authentic and compassionate Conservative Party.

Graeme Archer

I first met fellow-Scot Graeme at CH’s blog awards. Since then, I have increasingly admired his intelligent, witty and humane writing here and on Platform 10, even if the illustrations from formal logic and science are sometimes beyond my grasp.

All activists need motivation and commitment wherever they are involved. That much more is needed in areas where the party struggles. Graeme has worked hard to take ground for the Conservatives in Hackney, as has Andrew Boff, whose Mayoral campaign Graeme threw himself into.

I am particularly grateful for Graeme’s wholehearted supported for Iain Duncan Smith and the CSJ. We agree that a renewed Conservative focus on vulnerable people and communities is not just right in itself; it is also an important part of a positive, uniting agenda for the whole party.

Louise Bagshawe: Save the Gordon!

Merry Christmas to all, especially fellow Conservatives. It’s easy to live the season to be jolly when you’re hitting a steady 40% in most polls. And this time of year, we feel a particular need to be kind to the weak and helpless. Can we please prevail on cchq to mount a festive campaign to Save the Gordon?

Just think. Weak polls from Ming Campbell, following his many love-ins with Gordon Brown, and we harried him in office. He’s gone and the LibDems have Calamity Clegg. They have soared from eleven points to a mighty 14! Beware the new leader bounce!

Confession is good for the soul, so here goes; I felt a little stupid back in August. Months of polls showing a widening of our lead with Mr. Bean in charge, which I believed were accurate, were replaced with very different non-hypothetical numbers once he had actually kissed hands; Cameron down for the first time since his election. So what happened? Well, it seems those named leader polls, as PoliticalBetting pointed out this week, were accurate – but only after the new leader honeymoon had gone. Following wild highs and lows, they have settled for Gordon as predicted. But if there is any iron law in politics, I’ve learned the hard way it’s that a new leader, no matter who, will get a bounce. Do we want Gordon Brown out? I’m certain we could get him out. But why do it? The man should be up for one of Tim’s Conservative Politicians of the Year awards. No, no. Save the Gordon! True, people are heartily sick of the whole Labour government. Miliband, with his smirk, signing away our rights in Brussels. Jack Straw hectoring. Darling’s lack of shame. Even Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour stalwart, is calling this Government of No Talents cynical and shameless. But Gordon Brown is the icing on the Labour disaster. We must not repeat the Ming episode. I take back all the cruel things I have said about Gordon in this column. He is a one-man Tory vote getting machine!

Peter Franklin: David Cameron doesn’t get the credit he deserves

94%. That’s David Cameron’s approval rating from the latest ConservativeHome readers’ survey. I don’t know what Vladimir Putin gets from the readers of UnitedRussiaHome, but it can’t be that much better.

So why don’t I think DC gets the credit he deserves?

Well, I suspect that a good chunk of that 94% is fair-weather support – simple appreciation of Conservative success at the expense of Labour and the LibDems. It is, of course, rather nice to be tickling the mid-forties in the opinion polls, but there’s a lot more to DC’s leadership than that.

First of all, there’s the man himself. The public like him and they respect him – a combination we’ve not had in a leader since Harold Macmillan.

Then there’s his resilience. Unlike the rest of the country, DC had a rather sticky summer, thanks to the Brown bounce and the recruitment of a few giddy GOATs from the Tory ranks. Many feared, and some hoped for, a meltdown of the Cameron project, but he kept his cool. Not only that, he stuck to his strategy. What a contrast to his predecessors who were all forced of the path they’d set for themselves: William Hague who left the kitchen table for a foreign land; the Quiet Man who turned up the volume and Michael Howard who took an awful long time to gather his thoughts – changing his strategy no less than seven times.

Andrew Lilico: Things to believe and to disbelieve about climate change

Until perhaps two years ago, whether climate change was occurring and whether it was anything to do with human activity were topics that politically-minded people debated.  Greens urged that the burning of fossil fuels was going to heat up the planet, raising sea levels, expanding deserts, and causing much misery.  Climate change sceptics urged that the evidence was not there, and that we should not shackle the Market, undermine trade and limit the development of poorer nations on the basis of scare stories and hype.

In my view that debate went on rather longer than was fruitful, and because some people still cling to the most sceptical positions there, the real debate that we should be having has been seriously hobbled.  I shall explain.

I know lots of very smart people who still don’t believe there is any good evidence of human-induced climate change.  I understand why, as intellectually-confident individuals with lots of letters after (an sometimes before) their names they feel able to defy the overwhelming consensus of a scientific community.  Presumably many people that have become environmental scientists in the past twenty years took up research in that area precisely because they already believed that there was human-induced climate change, having been influenced by the concerns of green writers in the late 1980s.  That their subsequent research has confirmed their initial prejudices may make figures along the lines of “99% of all climate scientists think that…”  My guess is that the proportion of experts in feminist ethics who think that women had a good deal in the 1950s or that the husband is the head of the wife will be rather small, also.

But although, given the likely biases in the climate change research community, I think it appropriate to be polite to listen to my very clever friends’ scepticism, the fact remains that we forfeited our right to be listened to concerning the details of this debate when we chose not to do environmental science.  So now our entertaining dinner table debates cannot hope to influence policy.

Stephan Shakespeare: We live in un-visionary times

The year ends with the Tories well up, and Labour well down. It’s been an exciting few months, from the point of view of the horse-race. But how far have we really moved forward in the battle of ideas?

The horse-race matters. It’s not always edifying, but it’s not a trivial part of the democratic process. The politicians’ need to add percents to their score, point by point, is the only fuel for the progress of policy when vision fails, and sadly we can’t expect our politicians to have visions every day. They have to do something, whether it’s a photo-opportunity, a row, or a nice little tit-bit like the inheritance tax cut. What works and what fails gives them some sense of where they might go next, in the absence of any inner drive.

I suspect that if either David Cameron or Gordon Brown could find a real inner drive, a genuine vision for how they might change the country, then their support levels would grow with more solidity. That’s their challenge for 2008. Maybe something in their Christmas crackers will trigger a series of thoughts and emotions that grips their imaginations and leads us somewhere new.

We seem to be in singularly un-visionary times, whether here in the UK, or in the US, or in Europe. We have branding campaigns, and policy-tinkering, but no mission. Many will think this a good thing. Missions and visions can do great harm as well as great good. The last thing we want is a revolution when things are pretty much ok as they are.