This is the third in a continuing series of 'guest endorsements'. The next endorsement - of Liam Fox - will be written by Stephen O'Brien MP.
Our next Party leader needs three qualities above all: the intellect and imagination to understand the challenges facing Britain today; the experience and determination cope with the demands of being Party Leader, and the power to communicate both to longstanding supporters and to the wider electorate a distinctive vision for the future of our country. I believe that David Willetts has all three.
Few would challenge David’s intellectual credentials, certainly not Nigel Lawson or Margaret Thatcher, who head-hunted him to work for them during the 1980s. He always says that what first got him involved in politics was the rediscovery in the late-seventies and ‘eighties of free market economic ideas. What has marked David out from the intellectual crowd has been his work to reconcile free market ideas with the One Nation Conservative tradition.
In his pamphlet “Civic Conservatism” and more recently in his speech to the Social Market Foundation, Willetts has argued that most people in Britain have two central aspirations. They want freedom and opportunity: the power to make life better and more prosperous for themselves and their families. But they also want to feel that they have roots and identities: to live in a country in which there are strong social ties and common loyalties. Both are important and the lesson for the Conservative Party is that our language and policies should be both about individual freedom, private property and the market economy, and also about maintaining the institutions that hold our nation together.
David understands that it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer most from the unraveling of social cohesion. He supported Iain Duncan Smith’s emphasis on the Party reaching out to those in need, and on enhancing the role of the “little platoons” of the voluntary sector.
To be Leader of the Opposition or Prime Minister is to take on an all-consuming job. David Willetts knows the demands of politics at the top. He was Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, worked in the Number 10 Policy Unit, served as a Minister under John Major and for the last eight years on the Opposition front bench. He knows that the top jobs involve grind as much as glamour. He has the resilience to take knocks and return to the fray.
It’s reported that David Willetts is the Leader whom the Liberal Democrats most fear, and one can see why. Willetts has developed an effective, conversational style both at the Despatch Box and in the media. He deploys humour alongside intellect and self-evident reasonableness in debate makes his criticisms of the government more effective than strident condemnations. He has the brain, the style and the sense of purpose to persuade the average middle England voter that the Conservative Party is made up of normal human beings, that it will reform rather than dismantle the public services on which she and her family rely, and is genuine in its promises to serve the whole nation.
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