The Spectator’s Notes | 20 May 2006

The worst thing about being conservative is that it is so bad for the character. This is because conservative political predictions are far more often correct than left-wing ones since they are grounded in pessimism about what politics can do, so one is proved smugly right. We at the Daily Telegraph were the only newspaper, so far as I can remember, that predicted in the 1990s that the incorporation of the European Declaration of Human Rights into English law would be a disaster. We said it would make judges political, and it has. We said it would undermine our own more practical, precedent-based attitude to rights, and it has. And we said that it would turn the law into a means of imposing social policies which would be disliked by most people; it has. As has been his habit throughout his career, Tony Blair now recognises this conservative fact about ten years after conservatives pointed it out.