James Forsyth James Forsyth

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If you wanted a preview of the future of British politics, you should have headed through the back alleys of Westminster to Lord North Street on the last Monday in February. There, in the slightly cramped premises of the Institute of Economic Affairs, you could have seen the early stirrings of a Tory revolution. A group of MPs, most of whom had been in parliament for less than two years, were explaining why nothing less than ‘fundamental structural reform’ of the economy would solve the country’s woes.

Holding a public meeting a few weeks before your own government’s budget to announce what you would do if you were in charge would normally be seen as an act of monstrous vanity. New MPs are supposed to be lobby fodder, their opinions dictated to them by whips, not intellectual gurus. At any other time, these MPs would have been taken aside and quietly told to pack it in. But the freak combination of coalition and economic crisis has conspired to create a political opening through which a group of ideologically driven Tory radicals intend to pass. If they succeed, they’ll change the Tory party and Britain too.

Standing together that day, they looked like everything David Cameron hoped for when he came up with his modernisation project. Opening proceedings was Sajid Javid, the son of a bus driver. The next Tories to the podium were Kwasi Kwarteng and Sam Gyimah, both of whom had impressive careers before entering the Commons in their mid-thirties. They were followed by Priti Patel, a tribune of Essex and the daughter of Ugandan Asian immigrants, and Elizabeth Truss, whose northern family is left-wing enough that her father refused to campaign for her at the election. They seemed the perfect photogenic group of diverse Tories: proof that the party had changed.

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