Clemency suggests

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Letters

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Devilled by detail

Sir: Nick Robinson (Politics, 16 February) complains that David Cameron’s friends ‘cannot spell out what he would do’ in government. Of course they cannot. They are in exactly the same position as Margaret Thatcher’s supporters before the 1979 election, when she combined forceful speech-making with a limited programme of commitments that made her first election manifesto one of the shortest on record. That is the way the finest Tories do things in order to retain freedom of action in the face of unforeseeable events. Ted Heath, who spelt out precisely what he would do in 1970, devoted his embarrassed period in government to executing a series of U-turns.

But by 1988, when I interviewed David for a post in the Conservative Research Department at the start of his political career, Thatcher had largely surrendered her Tory flexibility. This, we agreed, could well make her salutory third-term aims of improving the public services and overhauling the welfare state harder to achieve. In a series of engaging speeches which I edited for publication last year — a far cry from Gordon Brown’s turgid tomes — David Cameron has set out a new framework for Tory reform while avoiding the detailed commitments for which Nick Robinson unwisely looks.

Alistair Cooke
London SW1

New kinds of authority

Sir: Trust in old institutions is in decline, but hierarchies are not flattening, as Fraser Nelson suggests (‘Trust in politics is dead: long live “wiki-politics”’, 9 February) — rather they are shifting. We are still a deferential and hierarchical society, but we respect and revere new kinds of authority. This challenges traditional social norms and institutions. Business and political leaders need to use new techniques and language to communicate with their audiences, but what they need to demonstrate remains the same: leadership and shared values. Ultimately, the means by which this is communicated will never be as important as the message.

Malcolm Gooderham
London WC2