People tend to see David Cameron through the prism of their hopes and fears. Labour supporters want to believe that he is a lightweight who won't stand up to the intense scrutiny of an election campaign. Pragmatic Tories think that here, at last, is a leader who can reach out and lead them back to power. And Robin Harris, self-appointed keeper of the Thatcher flame, fears a betrayal of that legacy (see Prospect, March).
The intoxicating narrative of the Thatcher premiership as a struggle between good and evil is one that has many adherents on the left as well as the right. I can understand why it must be tempting for people like Harris, who played an active role in politics at that time, to see it as an heroic era.
The truth is more complex. Of course Margaret Thatcher was a remarkable and strong-willed figure but she was also a pragmatist, just as ready to upset her right wing as Tony Blair has been to upset his left wing.
The main purpose of the Thatcher government was to sort out Britain's failing economy. But even here, conviction was tempered by realism. Why, after all these years, is letter delivery still in state hands? Why did the tax burden not fall to US levels under Thatcher's leadership? This was the woman who said, "The NHS is safe in our hands"—and meant it.
David Cameron's alleged offences against Thatcherite orthodoxy should be set in context. Harris is upset by the announcement that there will be no expansion of grammar schools under a future Tory government. But does he really think that dividing children into different schools at the age of 11 on the basis of a single exam is the best way of raising standards and tackling the decline in social mobility in the last 20 years? Thatcher didn't. Which is why she abolished many grammar schools as education secretary and did not reintroduce them as prime minister.
Rather than focusing on selection, the Conservative party should look at ways of increasing the number and range of good state schools—and giving children in failing schools a large amount of extra funding so that successful schools have an incentive to offer them places (for more on this see Policy Exchange's pamphlet "More Good School Places," December 2005). This, combined with a replacement of mixed-ability teaching by setting, would do far more to extend opportunity to the most disadvantaged than an academic test that creams off the best pupils into entirely separate schools.
Not content with disagreeing with the new Conservative leader's views, Harris seeks to misrepresent them. He accuses Cameron of attacking big business as a "malign interest." But since when was recognising that large companies need to be good corporate citizens equivalent to attacking them as malign? In the 1980s many Tories reacted to the entrenched anti-capitalism of the left by becoming uncritical cheerleaders for big business. The new Tory leader takes a more rounded view.
Cameron's instinctive understanding of the importance to economic growth of small businesses and entrepreneurs contrasts favourably with New Labour's corporatism. Gordon Brown equates "business" with major companies like Vodafone, and thus assumes that they have the staff to deal with red tape, which of course isn't the case with small firms. This makes the avowedly Thatcherite Harris's extravagantly expressed respect for Brown all the more puzzling.
Harris says that Cameron's support for the NHS means that he must see private provision in health as "morally discreditable." No. He simply believes that taxpayers should not subsidise people who go private. Similarly, Harris says that Cameron has "rejected tax cuts as a threat to economic stability." No. He has just stated that, like Geoffrey Howe, Thatcher's first chancellor, he recognises that economic stability is the overriding priority and that tax cuts should happen only when they are consistent with it.
Harris is also a less than reliable guide to contemporary Conservatism. In one passage he says, "Cameron should be worried that the party's new direction is treated with thinly disguised contempt by the policy experts, opinion-formers and intellectuals clustered round many of the Tory think tanks." Policy Exchange, which I founded and direct, is the largest think tank on the centre right. If Harris were to attend one of our regular events, he would encounter a new generation of people interested in centre-right ideas. And he would find them expressing relief that the Conservative party is finally putting its greatest hits album back in the memorabilia cupboard and turning its attention to the issues that voters worry about.
Harris goes on to warn Cameron thus: "Above all, he should be having sleepless nights about what he is doing to bedrock Conservative support in the country." For Harris, it is an article of faith that the majority of the British people can be attracted by a no- nonsense right-wing message that blends social conservatism with economic liberalism: "Having abandoned the issues of immigration, crime, Europe and tax as distastefully populist, the Tory manifesto may look a little thin." But this caricature of Cameron as a sniffy liberal elitist displays a profound misunderstanding of both the man and the plight of the party he has seized by the scruff of its neck.
The tabloid-friendly policies of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard were never as extreme as claimed by a New Labour propaganda machine desperate to scare its middle-class supporters to the polling station. But the Conservative party had become a toxic brand to which mud stuck all too easily. Charges of extremism and opportunism were all too believable—the depressing legacy of Jeffrey Archer's venality, Ann Winterton's odd sense of humour and a dozen other nightmares.
That was the party inherited by Cameron. A 200-year-old institution with a host of achievements behind it, and the tradition of Wilberforce, Disraeli and Churchill to look to for inspiration, laid low by the misdeeds and misjudgements of the recent past.
Conservative parties in many countries have been wrong-footed by rapid change but few have been so bewildered by transformations that they themselves have initiated. The Thatcher government put bombs under many traditional hierarchies, from the trade unions to the legal profession. Some groups, like teachers and civil servants, resented it, and hostility to the Conservative party became an ingrained part of their collective consciousness. But even the beneficiaries—the City traders and Asian entrepreneurs, the council-house buyers and small businessmen—failed to display unquestioning gratitude.
Once you start knocking down the bastions of privilege to allow a more meritocratic system to thrive, unexpected things happen. Deference no longer informs voting decisions.
The inability of the Conservative party to cast aside the old social attitudes that were crumbling under the twin pressures of 1960s liberalism and 1980s meritocracy was both a failure of imagination and a political disaster. The self-made City man didn't like his plummy-voiced Tory candidate patronising him. The Asian business tycoon had contempt for the racist joke-crackers. And the small businessman watching the debate on section 28 was as likely to be a gay travel agent as an Essex car dealer.
That's why David Cameron is different to previous leaders. He understands how Britain has changed. He knows that the challenge to the Tory party is not ideological but attitudinal. In 1945, as in 1979, there were huge shifts in the zeitgeist. Just as Attlee's administration, with its creation of the welfare state, was followed by a long period of Tory rule, so Thatcher's transformation of our society has been softened by Blair with a greater focus on the poor and social cohesion.
This is a new century and the next Tory government will look and feel very different to those of the past. At another level, the changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher, assisted by people like Robin Harris, are now woven into the fabric of our society. So come on out of the jungle, Robin—you won!
