The Tories will need more national fear to win

Only national insecurity will swing it for the Conservatives

Ten years ago this autumn I started to write a history of Conservative government in the 1990s. Guilty Men was designedly satirical and cynical — qualities which seem Tory to many. Some readers liked the jokes. Others, burdened by conviction, thought it too laconic by half — especially since I had been a Cabinet adviser (to John Redwood). Nonetheless the book had a reasonably serious aim: it wished to demythologise much of the stuff Tories believed about themselves and Britain.

Conservatives, I thought, had embraced a myth of their own invincibility. This was not just a question of their personal conceit. They had also become economic determinists: Britain in their view was a naturally Conservative-voting, free-trading country and the economic revolution of the 1980s had deepened that national condition. I thought this view was myopic: three administrations mattered most in determining the country’s 20th-century domestic history, those that took office in 1906, 1945 and 1979. The Liberal and Labour victories had set Britain on a path of high-welfare expenditure and governmental intervention in social policy. Tory privatisation made 1979 significant but buying shares at knock-down prices did not turn the electorate into ruggedly competitive individualists.

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Sack the judges

Leftist outrage and Tory smuggery were equally misplaced: the Thatcher governments were traditionally British in their high levels of public expenditure — especially so in welfare provision.The premier’s capitalist rhetoric concealed that truth. But her bold noise was believed and hated. Tories made a further big mistake. Their huge majorities in 1983 and 1987 were the result of a Left which was first divided (between Labour and the SDP) and then implausible (under Kinnock). But Conservatives governed as if they were loved for their own sake. Victory against the odds in 1992 deepened this collective delusion.