Let us leave the ‘centre ground’

30 September 2006

Maurice Saatchi says that the dull terrain of modern politics is the breeding ground of voter apathy and cynicism: the Tories must ‘climb the hill’ of idealism once more

The record seems to show that politics resembles war rather than chess. Generals say that the first principle of warfare is the selection and retention of aim. Generals say that you can’t win a war unless the aim is something good in the moral sense. The aim is not control of the air, or the taking of a bridge (they are ‘objectives’); the aim is the mastery of the inside of men’s minds, so that your troops believe they are fighting for a noble object.

Late in his life, Napoleon summed up how wars are won and lost. It was, he said, ‘Three parts moral. One part physical.’

Embroiled in three wars, and after many lives lost, Britain and America are still unable to express simply, in a few words, our war aim. ‘Democracy’ is sadly too abstract a concept for a world in which a British nurse on £15,000 a year is in the top 8 per cent of richest people on earth.

So what is required today more than air power, or financial power, or even manpower, is brain power; so that our ideas are more compelling, more penetrating and wiser, and all the world can see the splendour of our ideals.

If you want your country to be a ‘shining city on a hill’, then first you have to climb the hill. The centre ground is low and flat. From here you cannot see far. No man can see to the end of time. But if you climb to the high ground, there the air is purer and the sweep of naked eyesight much broader. To do that requires a certain idealism, a nobility of purpose, a marching tune that people can respond to; in other words, to be a vanguard force, not mere defenders of the status quo.

John F. Kennedy described himself, in a brilliant phrase, as ‘an idealist without illusions’. That is what is needed now to fight the War on Apathy at home and the War on Terror abroad. So come on, you Conservatives! Man the ideological barricades!