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.