The Spectator

Vote Tory | 30 April 2015

Election-day addresses from Andrew Roberts, Julian Fellowes, Michael Burleigh, Susan Hill, Robin Hanbury-Tenison and David Hare

(Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty) 
issue 02 May 2015

Andrew Roberts

 Biographer

The Cameron ministry of 2010-15 will go down in history as having made Britain as the most successful economy in the developed world, despite it having inherited a near-bankrupt nation from a Labour party that spent money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Ordinarily that should be enough to have it returned to power with a huge majority, but we live in gnarled, chippy, egalitarian times. The Prime Minister has overseen a hugely successful Olympics; saved thousands from almost certain death in Benghazi; won referendums on the alternative vote and (for the present at least) Scottish independence; protected 400 free schools and the great Gove education reforms; tried to save thousands from Assad’s poison-gas attacks (and been prevented from doing so by Ed Miliband); held himself in the best traditions of the premiership while somehow retaining his naturalness and sense of humour; given Margaret Thatcher a fittingly splendid funeral; found £1 million to save Hougoumont Farmhouse on the Waterloo battlefield from collapse, and offered the British people their first vote on EU membership for four decades.

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