David Willetts: The Conservative Party cannot disown its past
Confidence requires clarity.
David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a Conservative peer.
I had better start with a confession. Yes, I was at the launch of Prosper UK – there were many old friends there. I believe both Andy Street and Ruth Davidson are experienced political leaders and communicators from whom today’s party can learn a lot. David Gauke’s excellent column yesterday set out the case for the initiative very well.
Behind this is the question of the Conservative Party’s relationship to its own past. Most of the former politicians there knew they were former and weren’t trying to pretend otherwise. And most of us are realists about the next generation of Conservatives detaching themselves from us. It is part of the process of renewal; how to manage that process is one of the big challenges of Opposition.
In my pamphlet After The Landslide, I investigated how the Conservatives remade themselves after previous historic defeats. One of the clearest lessons was how much the party breaks with its own record in office and changes quite radically before it gets back into office.
Bonar Law told the Party Conference in 1917 “Our Party on the old lines will never have a future in the life of this country.” Quentin Hogg described the 1945 defeat as the result of “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practices and membership of the Conservative Parry.”
Compared to those blistering statements most of the comment on this website about Conservative Governments 2010-2024 is modest stuff – and Kemi Badenoch is right not to use up political capital on defending our record in Government.
Changing personnel is key to that distancing and renewal. Recruiting new candidates and reformed candidate selection was a key a part of the post-1945 recovery. Tali Fraser’s column on the fresh talent that has come in as MPs is a vivid example of that starting to happen.
There is also a process of learning from past mistakes. That is painful and necessary as part of renewal. After 1945 it meant confronting the role of many prominent Tories in appeasement. After 1997 it meant trying to tackle the caricature of Thatcherism as meaning “there is no such thing as society”.
It is very odd that the current process of critically appraising our record in Government appears to exclude by far the biggest single feature of the recent Conservative record – Brexit. It is hard for the party honestly to confront challenges from migration to the growth of the Civil Service if it is not allowed even to review the effects of hard Brexit. Indeed the process of renewal is only credible and serious when the biggest and most painful issues are confronted.
That is not because we are going to rejoin the EU, we aren’t, but because recognising its effects it is a …
Confidence requires clarity.
David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a Conservative peer.
I had better start with a confession. Yes, I was at the launch of Prosper UK – there were many old friends there. I believe both Andy Street and Ruth Davidson are experienced political leaders and communicators from whom today’s party can learn a lot. David Gauke’s excellent column yesterday set out the case for the initiative very well.
Behind this is the question of the Conservative Party’s relationship to its own past. Most of the former politicians there knew they were former and weren’t trying to pretend otherwise. And most of us are realists about the next generation of Conservatives detaching themselves from us. It is part of the process of renewal; how to manage that process is one of the big challenges of Opposition.
In my pamphlet After The Landslide, I investigated how the Conservatives remade themselves after previous historic defeats. One of the clearest lessons was how much the party breaks with its own record in office and changes quite radically before it gets back into office.
Bonar Law told the Party Conference in 1917 “Our Party on the old lines will never have a future in the life of this country.” Quentin Hogg described the 1945 defeat as the result of “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practices and membership of the Conservative Parry.”
Compared to those blistering statements most of the comment on this website about Conservative Governments 2010-2024 is modest stuff – and Kemi Badenoch is right not to use up political capital on defending our record in Government.
Changing personnel is key to that distancing and renewal. Recruiting new candidates and reformed candidate selection was a key a part of the post-1945 recovery. Tali Fraser’s column on the fresh talent that has come in as MPs is a vivid example of that starting to happen.
There is also a process of learning from past mistakes. That is painful and necessary as part of renewal. After 1945 it meant confronting the role of many prominent Tories in appeasement. After 1997 it meant trying to tackle the caricature of Thatcherism as meaning “there is no such thing as society”.
It is very odd that the current process of critically appraising our record in Government appears to exclude by far the biggest single feature of the recent Conservative record – Brexit. It is hard for the party honestly to confront challenges from migration to the growth of the Civil Service if it is not allowed even to review the effects of hard Brexit. Indeed the process of renewal is only credible and serious when the biggest and most painful issues are confronted.
That is not because we are going to rejoin the EU, we aren’t, but because recognising its effects it is a …
David Willetts: The Conservative Party cannot disown its past
Confidence requires clarity.
David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a Conservative peer.
I had better start with a confession. Yes, I was at the launch of Prosper UK – there were many old friends there. I believe both Andy Street and Ruth Davidson are experienced political leaders and communicators from whom today’s party can learn a lot. David Gauke’s excellent column yesterday set out the case for the initiative very well.
Behind this is the question of the Conservative Party’s relationship to its own past. Most of the former politicians there knew they were former and weren’t trying to pretend otherwise. And most of us are realists about the next generation of Conservatives detaching themselves from us. It is part of the process of renewal; how to manage that process is one of the big challenges of Opposition.
In my pamphlet After The Landslide, I investigated how the Conservatives remade themselves after previous historic defeats. One of the clearest lessons was how much the party breaks with its own record in office and changes quite radically before it gets back into office.
Bonar Law told the Party Conference in 1917 “Our Party on the old lines will never have a future in the life of this country.” Quentin Hogg described the 1945 defeat as the result of “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practices and membership of the Conservative Parry.”
Compared to those blistering statements most of the comment on this website about Conservative Governments 2010-2024 is modest stuff – and Kemi Badenoch is right not to use up political capital on defending our record in Government.
Changing personnel is key to that distancing and renewal. Recruiting new candidates and reformed candidate selection was a key a part of the post-1945 recovery. Tali Fraser’s column on the fresh talent that has come in as MPs is a vivid example of that starting to happen.
There is also a process of learning from past mistakes. That is painful and necessary as part of renewal. After 1945 it meant confronting the role of many prominent Tories in appeasement. After 1997 it meant trying to tackle the caricature of Thatcherism as meaning “there is no such thing as society”.
It is very odd that the current process of critically appraising our record in Government appears to exclude by far the biggest single feature of the recent Conservative record – Brexit. It is hard for the party honestly to confront challenges from migration to the growth of the Civil Service if it is not allowed even to review the effects of hard Brexit. Indeed the process of renewal is only credible and serious when the biggest and most painful issues are confronted.
That is not because we are going to rejoin the EU, we aren’t, but because recognising its effects it is a …
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