James Forsyth James Forsyth

Won’t get fooled again

Arch-moderniser Nick Boles on what the Cameroons got wrong – and why they’ll win anyway

Few have been more influential in the process of Tory modernisation than Nick Boles. He founded Policy Exchange, the think tank that came up with most of its ideas, and has been a tireless, tieless advocate for the cause. But when we meet in the Palace of Westminster, he is in reflective mood. The first phase of his career is complete (he was elevated to the government in the recent reshuffle) and he wants to talk about what he and his fellow modernisers got right and what they got wrong.

Boles is 6ft 6in, but he’s a friendly chap and he smiles a lot so you don’t feel talked down to. After we take our seats, he needs a moment to unfurl his limbs, but he’s soon talking animatedly, keen to discuss whether the financial crash affected the Tory modernisation project. ‘We shouldn’t take the excuse that we didn’t know then what we know now,’ he says, ‘because even if there hadn’t been the economic crash it probably is fair to say that one of the things that was missing was a story about how to improve most people’s material lot.’

Warming to his theme, Boles concedes that ‘for classic, relatively low income, Midlands and northern towns and cities there was something missing’. He blames this on the modernisers being ‘very carried away with — which were very much the media -zeitgeist — the chocolate oranges in W.H. Smith and some of the environmental messages and the work/life balance stuff and all of that. We got side-tracked a bit from what is now clear should be our proper concern… we didn’t have a strong economic message.’ They were, he says, perhaps ‘overly obsessed’ with university-educated professionals in Cambridge, and not attentive enough to ‘the hard-working strivers’.

Most modernisers abide by the dictum ‘never apologise, never explain’, so this is already a striking admission.

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