Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The real father of Cameronism

David Willetts says policy is overrated as a weapon in modern politics

Any attempt to trace the intellectual origins of today’s new Conservative party leads fairly quickly to the space between David Willetts’s ears. For the best part of two decades, he has been arguing for the need for a softer-focus social agenda which would resonate with voters who were convinced that hard-edged Thatcherism had nothing to offer them. In the early 1990s he called this ‘civic conservatism’ — yet it was lost in the messy decline of the Major years. Now, it is called Cameronism and is universally lauded. But rather than be fêted, Mr Willetts must watch like an inventor without a patent as his ideas are put to use by other people.

Success has many fathers, and there are several claimants to the David Cameron phenomenon. But should Mr Willetts launch a paternity suit, he can point to a small library of his own publications spelling out ideas which have now become official policy. Civic Conservatism came out in 1994, and could easily pass itself off today as a Cameron speech. His smile grows steadily broader as I put this to him — he’d expected to be asked about his job as shadow education secretary but is happy to discuss his unsung role in the party’s ideological odyssey. It turns out I know only half the story.

‘I’m so pleased you think it still strikes a chord because the dilemma is, I think, the same one we face today: what do you add to free-market economics?’ he says. This preoccupied him when he was in Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit from 1984 to 1986. The Tories had fixed the economy, but needed to add a social agenda. But his message, he suggests, was picked up by New Labour first. ‘Oddly enough, I think some of the Blairites read something I wrote even before 1994 saying it’s “markets plus communities”.

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