The Spectator’s Notes | 10 December 2005

So now conservatives, and particularly Conservatives, must all change ‘the way we look, the way we feel, the way we think and the way we behave’. It is a tribute to David Cameron’s persuasive charm that he makes people want to do these things. He has a knack of appealing to one’s better nature rather than rebuking one for one’s worse. When I took over as chairman of the centre-Right think-tank Policy Exchange after the general election, I encountered a group of mostly young people excited by policies for just such change, but exasperated at the lack of vehicles for them. New Labour had ceased to think, Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats didn’t much go in for that sort of thing, and the Tories were effectively leaderless. We were talking (and are talking still) about ways of making Britain more competitive, local, free and green. We wanted (and want) more thought about matters Tories haven’t thought enough about, like the life of cities, the mental networks which foster terrorism, the way planning controls make house-building worse.