Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I was talking with Andrew Blick about his post below on Michael Anchram’s brilliantly timed-to-be-divisive-just-when-unity-was-needed squib and we hit a fascinating theme. I had not realised that Ancram is the 13th Marquess of Lothian. Some of you may have seen Iain Dale’s furious response. He asked his readers to suggest a Top Ten List of Reasons Why Michael Ancram Should Be Taken Outside And Shot and started with reason Number 10: “So he knows how the grouse feel”.
This reveals one of the underlying reasons why the Tory Party finds it so hard to get its act together. It is riven by class division. My theory is that there is a Thatcher generation, young bright almost all men who watched the left disappear into the miners strike in the mid-1980s and became Tories. They did so because Thatcher opened the way for capitalism: with all its liberating energy (if you make money) and because it was radical not conservative. This generation, now in its 40s, was socially emancipated in terms of sexuality etc, it was urban and, indeed, cosmopolitan. It never rode a horse or shot a grouse.
But these incomers still found that top echelons of the Party were patrician conservatives, aching with privilege and never hard up - whether for inherited wealth, old-school contacts, a relative in the City or a spare silver spoon they could spit out when necessary. Capitalists too, of course, as the British landed class has been since the 18th century, the clearances and the slave trade. But not self-made. The patricians could never help but look down on those who, to use Alan Clark’s memorable phrase about Heseltine, “bought their own furniture”.
Today, smoothly, effortlessly (naturally), after all the hard graft was done by others, these *@!£$*g patricians have gone and walked off with the leadership - as if they are the modernisers! Doubtless, dimmed by his breeding and missing the point, Anchram thought he was talking chap-to-chap as one profoundly connected fellow to another, when he published his advice to Cameron. The Turks have a word for the undemocratic, military influence over party government, they call it the ‘deep state’. The Tories, I surmise, have a ‘deep party’. It is hated and feared by the newcomers. The deepness is related to one of the most profound issues in history, the relationship between town and country. The monarchy and all its attachments are dreadfully bourgeois, of course, but they live and dream a country life. The new, socially liberal Tories are urbanites. The gulf between these two forces is huge. If Cameron wins it will be because he manages to straddle it. I‘ve just written about the right’s domination of the UK’s blogland. My guess is that the bloggers are Tory cosmopoliticans and this is another reason for their energy, wit, outsiderdom - and sheer, old-fashioned class hatred of the likes of Michael Ancram.
