Can Tories prosper?

Baroness Davidson and the former West Midlands mayor Sir Andy Street have launched a new political project designed to provide a home in the Conservative Party for the politically homeless: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93v7nnk3vlo

Is KemiKaze listening?  No, she is determined to do battle with Reform on their territory as it becomes the party of failed Tory retreads.   Never mind all the moderates in southern England who voted Liberal Democrat.

There was a time when the Conservative Party had a strong One Nation element.  Clearing out some files recently, I came across some correspondence with Sir Ian Gilmour who was the intellectual doyen of the One Nation tendency.   The story of their elimination is partly the story of Thatcherism, although it is more complex than that.  When I get time I might write about it in more depth.

Indeed, Ian Gilmour and myself had a number of interesting conversations in his room at the Commions and ar White's and we provisionally agreed a plan for me to write an intellectual biography of him as a way of tracing Conservative history, but other more fundable projects got in the way.

The essential argument of Street and Davidson is that the Conservatives should be a (not uncritical) pro-business party which adheres to fiscal responsibility (which KemiKaze also claims to favour).

When I first went to uni in 1965 I was stlll very much influenced by my school friends (although they saw me as rather left wing).   I joined the unfortunately named FUCUA (Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations).   With some fellow students we joined an internal Conservative pressure group called Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism.

Going to FUCUA events, I quickly learnt that the Conservative Party was dominated by privately educated Oxbridge types.   I was also radicalised by the Vietnam war and was part of the big demo outside the US Embassy in March 1968.

I wish Davidson and Street (whom I have met and was impressed by) well, but I am afraid that they are too sensible to succeed.