Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites

12 January 2008

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

Most Westminster think tanks need to work with people from opposing parties to stress their cross-party credentials (thus protecting their charitable status). Perhaps as a result, the strain of thought emerging in some such organisations is a fusion of left-wing ideals pursued by right-wing methods. The Tory education policy is, in effect, the Blair ‘trust school’ writ large. The Tory welfare plan would enact the American-style welfare reform Mr Blair once enthused about. And these have come from a thriving think-tank circuit which has been blending such ideas for years.

Just as Baroness Thatcher relied on the Centre for Policy Studies while in opposition, Mr Cameron uses Policy Exchange, the most influential of the think tanks. James O’Shaughnessy, its deputy director, was recently hired as Cameron’s policy chief. This relationship helps to explain why a Conservative party which had no policies anyone could name four months ago has assembled such a coherent agenda so quickly.

Mr Brown still has his policy hatched in-house (or, more accurately, in Ed Balls’s house) and — apart from the appointment of Stephen Carter as principal special adviser in No. 10 — is sticking to his tiny team of aides. But he will at least be psychologically ready for Mr Cameron. After all, he spent the best part of a decade battling Blairite ideas on welfare and schools internally — and will feel more comfortable fighting them across the dispatch box.

Blairism is not dead after all, but lives on as the base of what many Tories now call progressive Conservatism. In Cameron’s hands, the empowerment agenda is more potent than ever — and may defeat Mr Brown yet.