The real father of Cameronism

21 June 2006

‘There were little things I worked on which still live on,’ he says. ‘I worked quite hard on spectacle vouchers, so people with low incomes can buy modern spectacles without being issued with standard NHS design. It’s now the only successful voucher scheme we’ve got.’ His pensions policy, he points out, went on to be government policy. ‘When I first said you should link the basic state pension to earnings rather than prices, many in my own dear party thought this excessive,’ he says. The proposal was adopted by Lord Turner’s pensions report (‘I talk to Adair a lot’), and duly endorsed by No. 10 and then reluctantly by Mr Brown who ended up ‘in a minority of one’.

No one thanks David Willetts for liberating them from NHS specs, nor for the pensions consensus, nor for the NHS internal market, and certainly not for the Blairite ‘third way’. He also mentions that he helped ‘get the whole idea of public service reform moving’ and was asking private hospitals to do NHS work in the 1980s, an idea which is now Blairite orthodoxy. It has been his role to make bullets for other people to fire. When asked which reform he is most proud of, he names nothing less than his role in introducing the flagship reform of the Thatcher era.

‘Going further back, I’d say privatisation. I remember going to a meeting when they said, “This policy we’re working on, we’re calling it ‘privatisation’ internally. We’d better be careful that’s not what it becomes known by because it’s a really ugly word.” We had a little competition trying to think of something better, but we couldn’t.’

The privatisation agenda is more closely associated with his great rival Oliver Letwin. Born just a couple of months apart, the two have competed for the role of ‘Brains’ in the Tory party. Yet Mr Letwin is playing guru to the thirtysomethings who now run the party. Mr Willetts has gone from Young Turk to Elder Statesman, having missed out on the political celebrity which was so widely forecast for him when he entered Parliament.