The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 26 May 2007

Readers respond to articles recently published in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Spectator</span>

issue 26 May 2007

Is it right to aspire?

Sir: According to your leading article, ‘The Tory party is a party of aspiration or it is nothing’ (19 May). If this means that the Tory party is a party in the interest primarily of that ambitious minority which wants to rise in the world, then I should like to disagree, if only because the great majority of the nation, thank God, are not social climbers.

By which I do not mean that the great majority of the nation do not have aspirations — to lead good and decent lives, for example — only that they do not necessarily have aspirations to join the rat race, believing that they can lead good and decent lives quite satisfactorily on the level of society into which they were born. In other words — unlike most of those who write about this subject — not everyone is consumed with a burning ambition to succeed in a worldly sense.

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