Spectator debate: ‘Pity Cameron’s a Heath not a Thatcher’

Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron.

Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Proposing the motion, Simon Heffer surprised everyone by launching into a warm tribute to Ted Heath. ‘A serious talent’, Heath had been hobbled by a ‘terrible desire to let the state take control’. In office he demonstrated a fatal ‘flexibility of principle’. Heffer worried that Cameron had the same predilection for followership not leadership. ‘I want a Conservative victory,’ said the Heff, ‘but do I want a victory with these Conservatives?’

Bruce Anderson opened with a pre-emptive attack on Peter Hitchens, accusing him of ‘sectarian fanaticism’. The account Hitchens has given of the present Tory party comes ‘straight from his bile-duct’. Anderson then looked back on his own long and meandering political route-march. Forty years ago he’d been a Marxist. By 1979 he was a Tory wet. Nowadays he’s a committed Cameroon and he heaped praise on his protégé. ‘A tough and stubborn man with excellent mental stamina.’ He extolled Cameron as the first Tory leader to speak out about the demoralised underclass.

Peter Hitchens replied with a similar confession about his past. ‘I was a much better Marxist then than [Anderson] is a Conservative now.’ He mocked the Labour administration as a ‘pro-crime, anti-education, Murdoch-run government’ which offered ‘insane subsidies to fatherless families’. As a former Labour insider, he was dismayed to see the nation being run by ‘ex-Trotskyists who have never confronted their past’.