I was amused the other week to read George Osborne’s Diary in this magazine. In it the man now in charge of giving away the British Museum’s collection recalled something John Major said to him in 1997. This was that the Conservative party ‘will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party’. It is news that the Conservative party ever was.
Really this was a warning from Osborne that the centre-left tendencies of the Conservative party must be adhered to. Though it should be noted that there is a flaw at the source: citing John Major on electoral advice is like quoting a bankrupt on financial planning. Major’s period in office was so calamitous that one of his main policies – pushing through the Maastricht Bill – not only divided his party but caused a wound that was only partly cauterised by a national plebiscite more than two decades later.
If the right is to cohere, it will have to have some soggy centrists and some people who are actually right-wing
Expect these warnings from the losing branch of the Conservative party for the foreseeable.
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