On our shoulders

Our politics is such a shallow game that any senior British politician who has read a book is apt to be considered cerebral, and if he has read two, feted as an original thinker. So I had never quite dispelled the suspicion that the nickname ‘Two-Brains’ might have been awarded to David Willetts for no better reason than that he knew his stuff, could talk like an academic, had a lively sense of the complexities of things, and sounded a little vague. I had wondered whether he might be one of those men to whom the learned footnote meant more than the useful conclusion.

This book goes a long way towards dispelling such suspicions. The Pinch is a powerful personal credo, a mine of information, and a solid and remorseless argument. It is the sort of work that gives intellectual spine to a whole political career. It assembles facts, it makes brave judgments, and it offers a conclusion that has large, obvious and quite immediate consequences for policy.

That Mr Willetts does not spell these out in manifesto terms is hardly surprising. He will be a Cabinet minister in a few weeks. The Conservative manifesto is for many to propose, and for David Cameron to dispose, and it is fair to say that Willetts has trodden very carefully (and with enviable skill) to avoid pre-empting it. But the response of some of Willetts’s reviewers — that his book is long on analysis and short on prescription — is wrong. Willetts’s proposals are no less evident for being implicit. No senior Tory colleague, not even Michael Gove, has gone further towards describing his political and moral compass. What does a compass do if not to point direction?