Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 10 January 2004

Michael Howard is my Aunt Maude

issue 10 January 2004

Six months can be an awfully long time in politics. When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under Iain Duncan Smith, few of them cared to admit that publicly. Even now, when the Tory coup has an eerie inevitability about it with hindsight, how many people can honestly say they guessed a year ago that Michael Howard would become leader by the year’s end? He has been compared with Disraeli; I don’t suppose many Tories remember John Bright’s words at the time of Dizzy’s accession to the Tory leadership. It was ‘a triumph of intellect and courage and patience and unscrupulousness in the service of a party full of prejudices and selfishness and wanting in brains’. A brilliantly apt description in 1868 — and now?

But the defenestration of IDS presented me with what my friend Michael Kinsley, the Washington Post columnist, calls an Aunt Maude dilemma.

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