The Spectator’s Notes | 9 December 2006

It is strange to find myself at odds with several fellow Thatcherites, but it seems to me obvious that David Cameron’s first year as Tory leader, which falls this week, has been a success. What his critics cannot get into their heads is that opposition is completely different from government. You can’t do: you must just be. So the first thing you have to be, particularly when people have long disliked your party, is nice. I read that focus groups say that Cameron has a ‘kind face’. Serious-minded people scoff at such things, but if voters thought he had an unkind face, the Tories would get nowhere. As for the reaction to his injunction about the need to show love for young criminals (misrepresented as ‘hug-a-hoodie’), some of it was slightly shocking. To say that criminals need to be loved does not imply that they should not be severely punished or that their victims should be ignored. It is simply a statement of basic Christianity and, in a way, of fact. If boys are consistently loved, preferably by two parents, they are much less likely to commit crimes. A fairer criticism of Cameron would be that he has not been very bold. He seems to shy off clear and new analyses of things. For example, though he is right about why identity cards would be a disaster, he has not really developed a tough-minded approach to the whole subject of security. Labour knows this very well, and will continue to devise more and more anti-terrorist legislation to show up Tory confusion on the subject. The defence of freedom, which Cameron rightly wants to make, will not cohere unless it involves the full identification of freedom’s enemies.

People are furious that MPs want bigger salaries. But what is so annoying is not any particular figure — £100,000 a year is said to be the latest sum sought — but the means by which MPs have turned themselves into a trade union.