The real father of Cameronism

Any attempt to trace the intellectual origins of today’s new Conservative party leads fairly quickly to the space between David Willetts’s ears. For the best part of two decades, he has been arguing for the need for a softer-focus social agenda which would resonate with voters who were convinced that hard-edged Thatcherism had nothing to offer them. In the early 1990s he called this ‘civic conservatism’ — yet it was lost in the messy decline of the Major years. Now, it is called Cameronism and is universally lauded. But rather than be fêted, Mr Willetts must watch like an inventor without a patent as his ideas are put to use by other people.

Success has many fathers, and there are several claimants to the David Cameron phenomenon. But should Mr Willetts launch a paternity suit, he can point to a small library of his own publications spelling out ideas which have now become official policy.