Cameron’s vision is a thing of beauty — but will it be destroyed by cries of ‘Tory cuts’?

Last week David Cameron delivered the best speech on modern Conservatism since Keith Joseph’s lectures in the late 1970s. Read to the Demos think-tank on Monday 30 January, it was a paper of real stature: lucid, original, candid and thoughtful.

Journalists do not much care for philosophical stuff unless it contains an ‘announcement’ or ‘throws down a gauntlet’, so this attracted little notice. No matter. This speech dispels doubts as to whether Cameron can bring to his party more than a shrewd grasp of marketing. It marks him as an intellectual leader too.

I shall now attack the speech. Too important a piece of thinking to be politely applauded, the emergent Cameronism deserves searching questions. For readers who have not read the speech, here in merciless summary is what Cameron said:

Under Margaret Thatcher the Conservatives so comprehensively achieved their goal of curing the economic ills and the Us vs Them mentality of 1970s Britain, that they delivered not just the country but their own party into a wholly new landscape.