The Spectator’s Notes

20 May 2006

The worst thing about being conservative is that it is so bad for the character.

The worst thing about being conservative is that it is so bad for the character. This is because conservative political predictions are far more often correct than left-wing ones since they are grounded in pessimism about what politics can do, so one is proved smugly right. We at the Daily Telegraph were the only newspaper, so far as I can remember, that predicted in the 1990s that the incorporation of the European Declaration of Human Rights into English law would be a disaster. We said it would make judges political, and it has. We said it would undermine our own more practical, precedent-based attitude to rights, and it has. And we said that it would turn the law into a means of imposing social policies which would be disliked by most people; it has. As has been his habit throughout his career, Tony Blair now recognises this conservative fact about ten years after conservatives pointed it out. But it is too late in his career for him to be able to reap the advantages of plagiarism that he has gained in the past. He has been in office for almost all those ten years. His angry condemnation is of his own conduct. He has pursued a parallel course about animal rights. By letting the anti-hunting lobby Pal buy the hunting ban in return for a large donation to the Labour party, he secured a highly emotional constituency. But he also gave official sanction to a form of fanaticism. The violent protests about animal testing, including Huntingdon Life Sciences and the extraordinary story of the body-snatching of a guinea-pig farmer, did not begin in 1997, but they got huge impetus from the Labour victory. In both the animal and human cases, Mr Blair’s idea of rights was wrong. Too late, he recognises it.

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