The case for Cameron

Many people’s walk to the polling station on 6 May will be spiced up by the prospect of playing a part in Gordon Brown’s removal from 10 Downing Street.

Many people’s walk to the polling station on 6 May will be spiced up by the prospect of playing a part in Gordon Brown’s removal from 10 Downing Street. Each voter will have their own favourite gripe: the pensions heist, the debt, the failure in schools, the catastrophic mismanagement of the financial system, the scandal of welfare ghettoes. The sheer scale and variety of Labour’s failures may impel voters to remove the party from office, but this reason to vote Tory is eclipsed by another, far more important one. And that is the case for David Cameron.

The Spectator’s endorsement of the Tories will hardly come as a surprise. We have been the world’s leading conservative magazine since Wellington ran the party. Unlike other right-leaning publications, we were never seduced by Tony Blair. And we were the only publication to back Margaret Thatcher during her first leadership bid, seeing radicalism where others saw triviality. We see the same promise in Cameron.

It is always difficult to grasp the radical nature of Conservatism, because it is distinguished by an absence of grand schemes and vainglorious projects. The Labour party is essentially about faith in the state: five-year plans, targets, quotas and goals for bureau-cracies. The essence of Conservative government, on the other hand, involves putting faith in the British people: the idea is that, if power is returned to them, they will use it more wisely and constructively than the government ever could. When Mr Cameron talks about ‘rolling forward society’, it sounds nebulous. But it stands in the finest Tory tradition, that of putting faith in what Burke called the ‘little platoons’.

Perhaps the best illustration of the coming Conservative revolution is Mr Cameron’s best and most developed policy: his plan for Swedish-style independent schools, paid for by the state.