The future’s bright for the right

There’s much gnashing of teeth about the future of the right today following Liam Fox’s resignation. I think this is misplaced. Fox was a passionate advocate of a certain strand of Conservative thinking. But his appeal and relevance was always going to be limited by his tendency to believe that it was, in political terms, always 1987.

The future of the right now, as Matthew Parris says (£), rests on the 2010 intake. They are, generally speaking, an impressive bunch. At Tory party conference, I chaired an event on the future of the party with four of its most able members. Strikingly, the panel, which spanned the ideological range of the intake, all agreed that the state was too big, that powers should be repatriated from Europe and that marriage should be supported. These are hardly the position of a shower of Wets.

Perhaps, the biggest challenge for the right now is to find a way to secure the future of the property owning democracy and to foster a popular capitalism.