(1) Reforming the Welfare State

It’s a long old argument, and Tories have done well by ducking it, but how are we really to get the state to have an optimal (minimalist but efficient) role in guaranteeing rather than providing welfare? Maybe this country really does want and will insist on a state-heavy approach, but I doubt it.

(2) Living with global capitalism

It seems likely that this country faces a long hard economic future in which its appetite for public and private spending is challenged by its difficulty in competing with increasingly successful and aggressive countries all around the world.

(3) Being a world hub of capitalism

It seems very likely that a large measure of this country’s economic success will depend on its being one of the HQs of world capitalism. That will mean that it remains highly unequal and has to be extraordinarily clever in its treatment of financial regulation.

Related posts:

1. Three Tory reasons to be cheerful This is a golden period for Conservatives. Their party is...
2. Tory politics after 2010 This is still a country which is socially conservative, sexually...
3. Bland cannot be the new Tory brand An Op Ed style comment piece to coincide with the publication...

There are three features of modern politics which mean the old party can flourish. 

(1) A new but fissured politics

The political genius of David Cameron is to have seized the most important single fact of change which lay before him.

For a hundred years, politics has been trench warfare between upper and lower classes, capital and labour, salary and wages, property and poverty, dissidence and dominance.

Tony Blair played several of those themes but helped us abandon others. Cameron has gone further: he has ripped up all the remaining class and collision understandings.

Of course, we now face the challenge and opportunity of a fissured politics in which issues will not be readily herded into neatly opposed platforms.

I can see at least one solution and I have argued for it over several years. It is that MPs will be elected and operate as candidates of this or that party but with an understanding of a range of issues on which they will not be party loyalists.

It is a nice idea that the country is basically centre-right or centre-left and that whoever captures one or other of these can then rule. Under such a dispensation, the extremes of left and right would be lively outliers and perhaps have their own flanking parties. In fact, I think, the country is composed of individuals who hold within themselves a multiplicity of views, and parties look like having to accommodate this degree of fissure. 

The Tories are more obviously, naturally and philosophically a broad church of pragmatists than any other party and should thrive in this era.

(2) Making orderly government out of disorderly politics

David Cameron’s biggest electoral mistake was to fail to emphasise an appreciation of the need to re-establish the institutions and habits of representative democracy. His coalition arrangement now makes it far more likely that he will be forced to operate a serious Cabinet, deploy a reinvigorated Civil Service, and surf a far more lively Parliament.

This is all excellent and in a deeply Conservative tradition of loving the business of government within the habits of mind of an evolving constitution. 

(3) the long Conservative moment

The Conservative party is a device to run a capitalist country which is tolerably fair, free and traditional. It usually loses power because its administrations get tired, arrogant and argumentative. I mean that is a natural party of government, but rightly can’t be given a monopoly of power. The worst hazards it faces are those of single party government and are less likely to afflict multi-party arrangements. 

I have no idea how the future will work out, but I think the country is ready to hear about some version of Conservatism, and David Cameron has found most of the right one.

Looking at politics now, it is Labour and the Lib-dems who have the greater problem in finding a narrative. Of course, it is true that the Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour face rather similar problems in working out what their core vote is and how much their “natural” supporters are an advantage to them.

The good news for the Tories now is that their party has a rich capacity for jiving different narratives, and generating new versions of old ones. It has always found people who get the story mostly right, and it just did.

Related posts:

1. Tory politics after 2010 This is still a country which is socially conservative, sexually...
2. Three (Tory) reasons to be fearful Just before I get too sunny, here are three areas...
3. Bland cannot be the new Tory brand An Op Ed style comment piece to coincide with the publication...

I am almost sure the country is in better political and constitutional shape than it has been in my adult lifetime. The political class is in terrific form. There’s a new tone about. The right is free of Thatcherite stridency. The left has elements of Foot-ite Leveller crunginess, but that’s looking like a dying or anyway a minority trope. Caroline Lucas seems a better sort of green than most we’ve seen.

Today, Sunday 9th, we have heard excellent things from John Rentoul, Nick Cohen, Lord Owen, Michael Portillo, David Blunkett. Nick Clegg will with luck match the open-mindedness of David Cameron and has already set an amazing precedent by inventing the Clegg doctrine of the “people’s mandate”, or the “moral mandate” for minority parties in hung-parliaments. The new parliament may be more lively and serious than we have seen for decades. Sure, Labour will face a colossal identity crisis, and the right ought almost to be able to sympathise.

We have probably come to the end of a ghastly 20 years for the right. Our natural party, the Tories, messed things up until giving David Cameron the leadership. (UKIP bled away some of the poison at the price of some electoral damage.) We had to grind our teeth whilst New Labour only governed well, when it did, almost by chance, granted its total failure to play Westminster and Whitehall with any dignity.

True, I think David Cameron has made some colossal mistakes, and not least in failing to make sure he was seen as wanting an entirely different style of government to New Labour’s. Still, as Michael White almost suggested in his TLS remarks on my latest book, Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics, he may well have plenty of chances now to be an amazing Prime Minister.

If he blows it, someone else may succeed in his place. I mean that the political culture is not likely to fail us.

I am  also hopeful that an entire generation of comedians and broadcast commentators – at least their drearily dissident, and childish, carping style – will also get swept away.

Related posts:

1. Mr Cameron’s makeover success? Six days before 2010 election and the beginning of a new...
2. Why is Cameron a Unionist? One often hears David Cameron state rather fiercely that he...
3. The Tories lack “bottom” The Tory leadership under David Cameron clearly lack something. Their...

Thirty years ago, the British accepted with some complacency that  six million Lib Dem voters got a rotten deal representationally. In an age of pick ‘n’ mix consumer choice and identity politics that looks less and less sustainable. Whether in hung parliament negotiations or electoral reform, we are likely to accord the Lib Dems more power in future. The wheels may fall off their wagon as we do so, or it may gather speed.

The Lib Dems face a fascinating dilemma. People like Simon Hughes say the country has a centre-left “progressive” majority but in the next breath has to accept that it has just given the centre-right a clear lead.  

From 2005 to 2010 David Cameron tried to make his party look like the Lib Dems. He succeeded and it is possible to argue that he rescued the Tory vote. But it is also possible to argue that he threw away votes too by seeming too Blairite to head a decent government. Anyway, the Lib-Dems slightly increased their vote too.

Can the Tories ever again get the right and the centre-right to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, can Labour ever get the left and the centre-left to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, will the Lib-Dems become a solid centre party, rather than a protest vote? There is a distinct possibility that when the Lib Dems have real power they will irritate people sufficiently to revivify support for a matching and opposed pair of centre right and centre left parties. 

I don’t think the parties’ leaders will get to choose very much about what unfolds in the medium term. We will almost certainly accord the third party more power. I have high hopes that parliamentarians (I mean individual MPs and peers) will gain authority, and I think they may use it toward fiscal soundness at least in the present crisis.  

I think in the very long haul, the statist welfare state is a dead duck. I think the country will then look more coherently like a centre-right country and that a party or a coalition which will look quite Cameronian will run things. I think it will be circled and harried by parties which represent, inter alia, various regions, civil liberty liberals, unionised socialists, and fundamentalist greens.

There are other possibilities. The country may stay wedded to a statist welfare state. Whether it does or not, Conservatives may still play an important role in running it well (as they often have done historically).

With or without a statist welfare state, Conservatives are likely to be very important in working out what sort of economic policy is workable, both in terms of efficiency and equitability.

I think the big opportunity for Tories – and David Cameron has ducked it for five years – is to build on his party’s reputation for sound government. New Labour delivered its policies in a very shabby way. This is the area where Tories can hit home, and play to instead of suffering from their reputation for pragmatism.

Related posts:

1. Three Tory reasons to be cheerful This is a golden period for Conservatives. Their party is...
2. Three (Tory) reasons to be fearful Just before I get too sunny, here are three areas...
3. Note to the 2010 MPs: “Grow a couple” In previous posts I have remarked what a great political...

Until Parliament sits, everything will look as though it’s a matter of leaders doing deals on the basis that they can deliver blocks of docile MPs who will vote according to party whipping. Good, we have to sketch in at least a temporary government and opposition.

But the real world of this Parliament will be more interesting.

Fact (1): The country has refused to back any particular party. This leaves it entirely open to individual MPs to open their eyes, get bold, and do the right thing.

Fact (2): All the parties promised to deliver unspecified pain to save the economy. This leaves MPs free to give their vote to whichever leader gets a decent programme together.

Fact (3): It will be Parliament and parliamentarians who will be seen to have failed if this country cannot now deliver a plausible economic policy. Conversely, this Parliament could go down in history as the one which rescued the UK’s small-g government and its economy.

Speculation: I imagine that the next government will be headed by David Cameron. His Tory MPs will be prepared to be pretty tough, if he is. I am pretty sure that enough non-Tory MPs will be alert to the nation’s need for firmness now. I’d be fascinated to see what argument might be adduced by those non-Tory MPs who don’t row in behind a policy of keeping a triple-A credit rating.

Back story

I am pretty sure David Cameron would have secured more seats if he had campaigned as a recognisable Tory type: a leader committed to good, sound, Cabinet government at the head of a stable team enjoying the confidence of a competent, professional Whitehall. Instead he decided on a Blairite strategy of presidential charisma. In short, as my “ romp through the intellectual traditions of British conservatism” Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics (SAU, 2009) argued, he decided to seek power in the manner outlined in my Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics (SAU, 2006, and described as “acute and entertaining”  by Rod Liddle in the Spectator.)

Related posts:

1. Tory politics after 2010 This is still a country which is socially conservative, sexually...
2. Three Tory reasons to be cheerful This is a golden period for Conservatives. Their party is...
3. Compare: Cameron & Blair and 1997 & 2010 Here we go again. We are headed for an epoch-making election with...

At this moment (tea time on election day, 6 May 2010) almost any outcome is possible. Let’s count the good things we can expect.

(1) A change of generation in parliament

The new lot may be clots. But they may well be independent-minded, lively, serious, patriotic, realistic, market-minded but compassionate and emotionally-intelligent.

(2) A period of slim majorities

We are in such dire straits economically that circumstances may provide the discipline which makes disparate parties, leaders and backbenchers work out sensible policies to follow and in ways which break old ideological and class moulds.

(3) An invigorated Civil Service

With luck, MPs and even ministers will understand that their role of oversight and direction requires and allows them to make sure that the Civil Service is celebrated as it generates good advice and guidance.

Related posts:

1. Three Tory reasons to be cheerful This is a golden period for Conservatives. Their party is...
2. Three (Tory) reasons to be fearful Just before I get too sunny, here are three areas...
3. Social media will transform Parliament The 2010 intake of MPs can transform government with a...

David Cameron undoubtedly took a risk when he decided that the future of the Conservative party was to forget and even deny its history. True, all Tories can claim that they are pragmatist and not much more. So not being intellectual, not citing history, and generally giving the masses whatever they seem to want, is all thoroughly Conservative behaviour. Arguably, it is the heart of Conservative behaviour. Still, no Conservative politician has even been so breathtakingly cavalier in their approach.

Did it work? One can argue that when Mr Cameron embraced vapid centrism, he was doing a molecule-swap with the Lib-Dems and that Mr Clegg returned the complement. Using the gift of TV, Mr Clegg made himself indistinguishable from Mr Cameron. The centre ground suddenly looked very spacious and very crowded. Mr Blair suddenly had two political heirs, not one.

One can say that Mr Cameron’s approach courted a middling victory as a middling party. This was better, he thought, than going hammer and tongs for a full-blooded Tory approach which might have courted solid defeat. 

I argued in my book that Mr Cameron was right to modernise and detoxify and to understand that there are very few moments when the Tory right is electable and this definitely wasn’t one of them. That meant that he had to risk the crowded centre.

Even so, I think he made a signal error.

Here’s where I differ from almost all the commentary I see. I think David Cameron could have looked much more solid and quite different to Nick Clegg if he had played to some very old and worthwhile Tory narratives. I believe that the country carries in its head three Tory tropes: “Nasty”, “Nice” and “Sensible”. It’s the last which Mr Cameron could have drawn on.

He had five years in which to play to themes of Conservative good government. One of them could have buried the Curse of Black Wednesday (Labour loved the ERM too and anyway the economy took off soon after the crisis). Another could have thumped Labour’s charge of “Tory boom and bust” (a cycle which had been sorted out by 1997). And so on.

My tricky point here is that one did not have to defend Thatcherism (or any other Tory prime minister) wholesale. There was indeed no harm in putting some distance between modern Toryism and Mrs T’s exceptional and ahistorical version of the creed.  But it was an important mistake to be so frightened of the party’s back story.

When Gordon Brown in televised debate charges Mr Cameron with being about to usher in recession and unemployment on  a scale of the Tory tragedies of the 1930s, 1980s and 1990s we are hearing an old Labour message which is rendered all the more powerful by Mr Cameron’s having abandoned the basic Tory message: “Yes, we’re tough. We have to be. We always have to come in and pick up your pieces.”

We’ll see. In a TLS piece which discusses my book amongst others (“Is there a leader in the House?”, 28 April 2010), Michael White of the Guardian, suggests that Mr Cameron may well have the chance to prove himself the kind of Tory I would like him to be, in Number 10. It’s true, and arguably all that matters.

I still think that Mr Cameron could have got more votes, and a better mandate to govern, if he had laid out a solider message. Indeed, I fear (as I argue elsewhere and at www.makingbettergovernment.com) that his governing instincts may be as dangerously Blairite as his electoral instincts were.

Related posts:

1. My new book: “Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics” Buy Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics: Why old Tory stories matter to...
2. Compare: Cameron & Blair and 1997 & 2010 Here we go again. We are headed for an epoch-making election with...
3. Why is Cameron a Unionist? One often hears David Cameron state rather fiercely that he...

There’s a mass of guff about how social networking is transforming politics (Newsnight on Monday was a prime example, whilst today Iain Dale rebuffed the theories rather well). We should note that the real  impact of cyberspace will be to empower backbench MPs. What fun. In place of the mantras about People Power and disintermediation, the real beneficiary of Blackberry and Facebook may well be representative democracy. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7640143/General-Election-2010-This-was-meant-to-be-the-internet-election.-So-what-happened.html]

The May 2010 intake of MPs will have a unique opportunity. Their party leaderships are weak (and in two cases, nearly as inexperienced as they are themselves). Their party platforms are vague. Their constituents have no firm idea about what they are like. If there’s anything like a balanced parliament, every backbench vote will count. This adds up to an opportunity for the new MPs to perform a generational coup. They understand two very modern phenomena which will transform politics: personal branding and peer-to-peer networking. The social media generation ought readily to spot how the individual MP can be restored to power.

Being inexperienced, the new MPs should find courage in the idea that the political legislators’ proper role can be to work with the professional executive, not just boss it about and certainly not sneer at it or circumvent it. A certain modesty may become them and be the making of them. They are potentially the new meritocratic, public-spirited elite who can restore trust in politics and Parliament and produce a quite new quality of government.

We know Parliament has been crippled by over-mighty party leaderships. We know our brilliant Civil Service has been sidelined by an overly-centralised Number 10. We know the media has over-fancied itself as the scourge of the political system. This is a great moment for an inexperienced but savvy Westminster to insist that a case-hardened Whitehall lay out proper policy options for debate and decision.

This is a constitutional and political moment in which a new generation of politicians can make Parliament become something quite new. The new MPs need not be in thrall to the worst traditions of the discredited parliament, nor to the gangmaster power of the party whips. Above all, they need to insist that they are Edmund Burke’s “representatives” of their constituents, not the mandated delegates of a union conference; not party hacks;  and still less the social worker, nursemaid or ombudsman of every voter with a beef against the local or national state.

This is the parliament that can bury traditional class politics. It will be a parliament of indistinguishable, middle Britain types, mostly estuarine in tone in spite of some voices from all over the social scale. Many of the Tories will be rather Thatcherite. Apparently, a lot of the Lib-Dems will be quite lefty. I have no feeling for how New Labour the new Labourites will be, but I imagine there’ll be more flux than we have seen recently. There’ll be plenty to argue about, including ideologies, but few simple fault lines. Take it all together, and we may see the three parties fracture along new lines, as I discussed in my 2009 book, Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics and the formula for Making Better Government (as my website of that name has it).

 The new MPs have several duties. Top of the list will be spotting and supporting whatever policy has the best chance of securing economic growth and reassuring the markets about Britain’s preparedness to pay down the national debt, sometime fairly soon. Second will be agreeing a pragmatic but honourable military policy in Afghanistan. Third will be developing a plausible policy for the future of the bottom 10 percent of society. Fourth will be the sketching out a long term policy for the future of the welfare state.

The country has faced all these sorts of issues in its recent history and we know that dealing with them will bend old hat party allegiances and identities out of shape. That doesn’t matter. The old parties have great histories, and have mostly abandoned them, for good and ill.

We are in new territory which will see new, often temporary alliances, getting built on the ruins of old ones. I only hope the young MPs know how lucky they are to be picking up the reins at this moment.

Related posts:

1. Note to the 2010 MPs: “Grow a couple” In previous posts I have remarked what a great political...
2. Three Tory reasons to be cheerful This is a golden period for Conservatives. Their party is...
3. Three reasons to celebrate this election… This is perhaps the most exciting election of my lifetime,...

Plenty of people thought that Cameron’s “Nice” Tories are a cover for the “Nasty” Tories lurking within or behind the smiling faces. That’s a possibility, and I have no idea whether it’s true. I rather hope it is.

A lot of comment seemed to think that the Cameroons are genuinely very like the Blairites in being the embodiment of the centre-right (or, according to view, the centre-left) settlement reached by Thatcher’s children.   That seems plausible, if only because the Cameroons look like realists.

Anyway, the point of my book and Cif piece was to argue that it is governmental competence which may be the thing which appeals to voters now. No party - and none of the comments to my Guardian piece – has picked up on that yet.  Here’s why I wish they would.

Put very briefly: 
British politics is now about the canny management of economic life and the taxation required to fund the public services whose competent delivery and very gradual reform are mostly administrative problems. This isn’t romantic, exciting, ideological work. New Labour has shown how not to do the business of government. Whichever party persuades the country it can do better will win the country’s voters who don’t even know that’s the question they seek answers to. 

In more depth:
I’d have thought that whoever does it, the country has to be managed as a mildly Eurosceptic, mildly pro-US, 35-45 per cent tax-take sort of place. (That is, in tax-take terms, somewhere in the middle of the Anglosphere range, and well below Scandinavian and a bit below the Franco-German levels.) 

I don’t think anyone has the courage to seriously reform the Welfare State as a matter of stated desire, though balancing the books will tend to discipline the later Brownite extravagances and that will open up some possibilities.

I believe the country is mildly entrepreneurial; mildly illiberal on crime, punishment and civil liberties; mildly permissive on the family and sex and drink; and quite attached to its Welfare State, but also the military and police.

The huge centre of politics unsentimentally understands these facts. If one fielded a “Milliband + Darling” against a “Clegg + Cable” against a “Cameron + Osborne”, I’m not sure that the electorate would see much difference, or care.

I am of course an “extremist” by idealism, and I think that over a generation or two the Welfare State will be transformed (made redundant), squeezed between taxpayer reluctance and market success. I think the Conservative Party will be on the road to being meaningless or dead if it doesn’t start to say that sort of thing soon. However, that project is a long-term goal and should be framed as such.

I don’t know if Labour will frame itself as the representative of the trades union power of the Welfare State. If it does, I’d have thought it will have scant reach. If it doesn’t it really will be head-to-head with the Tories who will always have the edge as the “taxpayers’ alliance”. I don’t know if the Tories can hang on to any serious low-tax principle without alienating that part of the middle class which through guilt or self-interest thinks the Welfare State works quite well. In short, there is electorate hell to the left and right of the centre and muddle at its heart.

The centre ground is now so crowded that we may be about to see a new fractured politics. It’s far from inevitable, but imagine a new, lively parliamentary scene with prime ministers and Cabinets coming and going as old and new parties coalesce and dissolve. That has been the  norm for much of British democratic history.

Out of such shifts there may come a strengthened administrative ability and willingness to deliver an underlying consensus.

A very fluid political system will lead to a desire to have a professional elite – Whitehall - anwerable to Parliament and in charge of developing and delivering sound policy. That will prefigure a return to a British constitutional settlement which can be very modern but also authentic and effective.

Call me a dreamer. On the other hand, the British never have screwed up their government for long. Why assume this generation will?

Related posts:

1. Tory politics after 2010 This is still a country which is socially conservative, sexually...
2. Three (Tory) reasons to be fearful Just before I get too sunny, here are three areas...
3. The Tories lack “bottom” The Tory leadership under David Cameron clearly lack something. Their...

At this moment, it seems that Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics (as I called them in my latest book) have made all the worst of the mistakes I identified as possible. I hope I’m wrong and that the Cameroons do believe in something and that it is about good government for modern Britain. Mind you, I don’t much mind. Most modern young politicians probably recognise and accept most of the direction of travel I describe, though I express a slightly extreme and eccentric expression of the ideal.  This agenda will get delivered almost by osmosis, whoever gains power.

I suspect modern retail politics is becoming more cowardly – more fearful of all sorts of no-go areas – and yet there are real, tempting opportunities to do the kind of thing I approve of, and they may happen in very piecemeal, crab-wise sort of progress.

I very much believe in the British state. Crown, Parliament, Whitehall, the justice system, the armed forces: I think of them as the essential institutional legacies of our nation. However, I believe in the state as a Hobbesian enterprise in which The People agree to license almost all society’s compulsion and violence to a set of institutions whose primacy and legitimacy are very visible and even glorious.

In short, the state is forceful and glamorous. (I don’t think of it as ossified: it has always evolved and presumably allways will.)

I believe that the state is very good when it is very strong and very limited.

It is easy for me to go on to argue that when the state attempts to do good it is likely to overwhelm and weaken society’s own capacity to produce good. In essence, the state can only do good by introducing lots of coercion, because that’s its USP. Besides, the more the state does, the more there’s a political class – and a politicised workforce – longing to get their hands on all that loot and authority. It’s a corrupting process. 

I am as much a fan of Erasmus as of Hobbes. So I am a reformer, not a revolutionary. I think we should put the state back into its box, with maybe a tax-take of 20 percent of GDP (not the 40 or 50 percent of Western Europe and Scandinavia). But I think that is the work of generations.

Right now, I can argue for the expansion of the British military because it does its work so well and can be put at the profitable service of the world. Besides, it’s a core state activity. I have done work on a New Military Covenant, and you can check it out at this site.

I think Whitehall ought to be braver, more vocal and more independent of the government of the day as it serves The People by serving the Crown. Naturally, what the state does, it ought to do well and Whitehall is crucial to that, not least as bit by bit we reduce the reach of the state. I have done work on Making Better Government. By the way, I believe in The Archipelago State of quangoes, and agencies spawned from the centre: arm’s length power.

 I think we should scrap the BBC because it’s so easy to do and will serve as a model for dismantling the NHS and the Welfare State.

I think within a generation or so, the NHS, education and pensions will be transformed. The market and volunteerism (more of the former than the latter) will ensure that firms and trusts of one sort or another will own nearly all the infrastructure and pay for nearly all the human welfare services.

Rightly, the talk now is of allowing parents to mandate that firms or trusts take over schools, or set them up. Nowadays, you can buy a hotel bed within the NHS, or buy a private insurance for privileged access to its services. There’s talk of old people insuring against needing access to private residential care. “Nudge economics” will soon be used to get young people save for pensions.

Eventually, the state’s role will be to mandate some redistributive taxation and some compulsory saving and investment.

I think the Tories should start describing something like the above as their long-term goal. Right now, they should promise to maintain the existing welfare state whilst gradually allowing private entities to present parallel alternatives. This is happening now, and it is interesting that Labour and Tories are neck and neck in their approaches. As I argued in my book on Tony Blair’s government, Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics badly bodged this sort of reform by never bothering to understand how British institutions worked.

The point is that the Tories can say that their long term goal is a gradual move to a small state, along the lines promised by New Labour. Labour can do as they like,  but presumably will want a world with more redistribution and a larger state than the Tories believe in.

Would my post-Welfare State world, as above, be “modern, radical and progressive”? It would look radical by our present standards (but not achieved in a remotely revolutionary way). It would be progress (but not perhaps progressive by the standards of normal leftish language). It would be modern.

I have no idea what the Cameroons actually want, and I don’t really care. I think the sort of state I have in mind is very British, and which if any of the existing parties get into the swing of this stuff is their business. Someone will, I think.

Related posts:

1. RDN on Guardian’s Comment Is Free (Cif) I was bucked to have a piece run on the Guardian’s...
2. The Tories lack “bottom” The Tory leadership under David Cameron clearly lack something. Their...
3. Tory politics after 2010 This is still a country which is socially conservative, sexually...