The Conservatives have hardly ever had it so good

Pessimism among Conservative candidates, extending to anguished doubt about their deficiencies as public speakers and their general ability to stay the course, is nothing new. As Chips Channon asked himself in his diary for 20 February 1934:

Am I wise to embrace a Parliamentary career – can I face the continued strain? James Willoughby told me today that he nearly gave up his Parliamentary campaign in November, as he just could not stand the ordeal of speaking: when he confessed this to his agent, the man replied, ‘Don’t let not speaking well dishearten you: I have known candidates who could not even read.’

We must all hope that in its restless quest to mirror the British people, the Conservative party will launch a drive to increase the proportion of its candidates who cannot read, but at least it already possesses an impressive number who cannot speak particularly well. Speaking with spurious ease is the stock-in-trade of the media class, a group which may well, as Craig Brown said in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, be ‘ever-expanding’, but which inspires a certain scepticism among the general public. If the Conservative party has any point, it is surely to steer clear of such people. Faced by a choice between metropolitan glamour and the dowdy but enduring life of the provinces, it must know in its bones that its place lies with the provinces.

The future is bright for the Conservatives precisely because they are unfashionable. New Labour is like the new economy: a bubble so immense and so seemingly durable that even sober people have been forced to take it seriously. A few months before the boom in high-tech stocks collapsed, I remember a stockbroker in Edinburgh, a man of palpable shrewdness and caution, explaining that there was a thing called the new economy, in which all the traditional rules had been suspended.