I’ve just come back from the Policy Exchange party, which had an austerity feel to it: smaller guest list, no bubbly. And David Cameron gave a good, but rather low-key speech where he said he was pleased that his speech at LSE today went past with no tomatoes being thrown. LSE has a left-wing reputation, Cameron said, so he was pleasantly surprised to see queues around the block.
The LSE does have a reputation as a hotbed of leftism. But it is also the spiritual home of fiscal conservatism. It was here that Frederick von Hayek came in the 1929 invited by Lionel Robbins. The two of them built the LSE economics department into perhaps the most formidable nerve centre of free-market economics in Europe – at a time when socialism, in its nationalist and Marxist variants – was taking the continent by storm.
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