Politics: What Dubya taught Dave

When you think of George W. Bush, ‘philosophical influence’ isn’t the first phrase that springs to mind.

When you think of George W. Bush, ‘philosophical influence’ isn’t the first phrase that springs to mind. But the former president has as good a claim as anyone to be a philosophical influence on the Cameron project. Although the intellectual debt was never acknowledged because of Bush’s unpopularity in this country, David Cameron adopted a great number of Bush’s tactics as he tried to detoxify the Conservative brand.

Bush had shown Cameron how the right could win in a post-cold war era when the great economic questions appeared to have been settled. As George Osborne, Cameron’s closest political ally, wrote in this magazine in 2004 in a piece supporting Bush’s re-election bid, Bush ‘found an answer to this question: what is the right for in the age of Clinton–Blair? The Conservatives would do well to listen and learn.