What, if anything, can the Republicans learn from Cameron?

In National Review, John O’Sullivan, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, wrote an essay about what lessons—if any—there were for the Republicans from Cameron’s modernisation of the Tory party. Alex Massie took issue with it. Here, John responds to Alex’s critique.


Alex Massie begins his criticism of my National Review article on the Cameron project of reforming the Tory party by assuring any nervous Cameroons that “Daniel Finkelstein simply demolishes” my argument. Well, the exchange between Mr. Finkelstein and myself is now available at the Corner and on Mr. Finkelstein’s Comment Central at the Times. So your readers can judge for themselves exactly who demolishes whom.

According to Mr. Massie, however, it wasn’t a fair contest in the first place. I entered it handicapped because, like other British conservatives inhabiting a comfortable cocoon in Washington, I must inevitably think British conservatism “fatally muddled by compromise,” dislike the “uncomfortable truth that Britain is not an ideological country,” and fail to grasp that Thatcherism was “a minority pursuit” in the Tory party.