Today’s Daily Telegraph has the skinny on the Midlands Industrial Council, one of a number of private funding conduits having been using since the now defunct ‘River Companies’ set up after world war two:

‘The MIC was founded in 1946 as a pressure group to fight the Attlee government's nationalisation plans and champion free enterprise. It has been giving money to the Tories for 60 years ...

‘Between April 16, 2003, and March 14, 2006, the Conservative Party received 52 donations from the MIC totalling £968,690.

‘Membership is exclusive, being invitation only. All have connections with the Midlands and none resides overseas. Members meet about five times a year, go to Westminster to lobby and each year discuss … the amount they want to give to the Tories. The fund varies with the political cycle, but is usually in six figures.

‘Only three of its members are known: Sir Anthony Bamford, the head of the JCB tractor empire, the truck firm founder Chris Kelly and Robert Edmiston, the head of the car importer IM Group.

‘A leading Tory benefactor, Mr Edmiston was put forward for a peerage by the Tories. But the nomination was blocked along with a group of Labour nominations by the Lords Appointments Commission.’

Telegraph journo Neil Tweedie – hi, Neil – adds:

‘Even helicopters are available, or money for a building survey. The more than 30 businessmen who make up the council are not short of the odd helicopter, or money.

‘As one well-placed source told The Daily Telegraph: "I once tried to add up their worth and gave up after £4 billion."’

Wealthy businessmen are make political donations for the good of their wealth, not for the good of their health. The reliance of both New Labour and the Tories on fat cat chequebooks cannot be healthy in a democracy.

Whatever happened to mass membership parties, funding by aggregating smallish donations from individuals who believe in the manifestos that are put forward?

Compare and contrast the piece with the speech of little more than a year ago, when the man who today insists he first got involved in politics to further Thatcherite goals insisted: ‘And let me make one thing clear. I'm a liberal Conservative … I say to Liberal Democrats everywhere: we're on the same side now.’

It’s just wonderful how he effortlessly manages to make out both cases with pretty much the same meaningless rhetoric. You see, Cameron is ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ and ‘mainstream’. He’s ‘decent, competent and comfortable with the modern world’. He favours ‘a forward-looking, open-minded, long-term approach to the big challenges we face’.

That’s terrific, Dave. But then, can you show me a single politician who owns up to being old-fashioned, reactionary, marginalised, indecent, incompetent, uncomfortable with the modern world, and favouring a backward-looking, narrow-minded, short-term approach to the big challenges we face?

Cokehead has yet to make his pitch for the disillusioned left yet. But given his support for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and his emphasis on social justice and the environment, Cameron’s speech positioning himself a socialist Conservative cannot be too far away.

But Oliver Letwin (pictured) – irreverently dubbed Oliver Leftwing by sounder colleagues – is a brainy type of chap. And as the Conservatives’s policy review director, he is licensed to dabble in ideas.

Hence a speech to Policy Exchange earlier this week - posted a couple of hours ago on Conservative Home - in which he comes up with nothing less ambitious than a Cameroon critique of Marxism.

After offering the standard Tory disclaimers that Cameron Conservatism is ‘radically pragmatic rather than radically dogmatic’ and indeed ‘profoundly sceptical of theory as a guide to political action’, he proceeds to reassure the world that it is nevertheless based on ‘coherent theoretical dispositions’:

‘First, it is an attempt to shift the locus of debate from an econo-centric paradigm to a socio-centric paradigm.’

Paradigms already! The man’s obviously been on the Thomas Kuhn, and the sun isn’t even over the yardarm yet.

‘Second, it is an attempt to shift the theory of the state from a provision-based paradigm to a framework-based paradigm, within which government (apart from its perennial role in guaranteeing security and stability) is conceived principally as an agency for enabling individuals, families, associations and corporations to internalise externalities and hence to live up to social responsibilities without the further intervention of authority.’

Nothing new here. This is straightforward advocacy of a Friedman/Nozick minimalist ‘night watchman’ state position. It’ll organise the armed forces, police and prisons – the ‘repressive state apparatus’, if we really are talking political theory - and that’s your lot.

Letwin’s call for individuals to ‘internalise externalities’ and ‘live up to social responsibilities without the further intervention of authority’ is Cameroon codespeak for greater freedom to pay for your own healthcare. The opposite of a provision-based paradigm is a no-provision-based paradigm, is it not?

Just to underline his admiration for the glory days of laissez-faire, Letwin evokes the world before the arrival of Marxism:

‘Before Marx, politics was multi-dimensional - constitutional, social, environmental as well as economic. But Marx changed all that. The real triumph of Marxism consisted in the way that it defined the preoccupations not only of its supporters but also of its opponents.’

That’s nonsense, of course. Politics before Marx – at least in Britain – was mono-dimensional, the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and upper class families. The sort of people that used to send their sons to Eton. The sort of people that still do send their sons to Eton, as witnessed by … well, the Cameron Conservative shadow cabinet, for example. Little wonder Letwin and friends are nostalgic for that lost world.

Meanwhile, I know from researching my own family tree, at least one of my forebears died in a workhouse. Others probably knew what the inside of a Poor Law Bastille looked like.

Politics before Marx was the politics of rotten boroughs, the politics of the disenfranchisement of almost all men and absolutely all women, the people that the top Tory intellectual of the day, Edmund Burke, decried as ‘the swinish multitude’. Nor was politics ‘environmental’ in any meaningful sense. This was the period were the worst pollution excesses of the industrial revolution.

The real triumph of Marxism was to act as one of the intellectual catalysts that galvanised a labour movement that – through its collective political action – was a vital factor in every single worthwhile democratic and social gain reluctantly conceded by the British ruling class in the twentieth century, always in the face of Conservative opposition.

‘After Marx, socialists defended socialism and free marketeers defended capitalism. For both sides, the centrepiece of the debate was the system of economic management. Politics became econo-centric.

‘But, as we begin the 21st century, things have changed. Since Thatcher, and despite recent recurrences of something like full-blooded socialism in some parts of Latin America, the capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas …’

Here Letwin is correct, at least for the time being. Neoliberalism has been the ascendant ideology of the last three decades. And the world we see around us – from the homeless of Britain to the malnourished of Africa – is the consequence of that ascendancy.

‘Cameron Conservatives have recognised the profound consequences of the fact that we have entered a post-Marxist era. Politics - once econo-centric - must now become socio-centric …

‘The first theoretical advance (the first paradigm shift) of Cameron-Conservatism is to see that fact clearly - to refocus the debate, to change the terms of political trade, to ask a different set of questions.’

The successor to socialism, Letwin reiterates, is the ‘provision-theory of the modern state’:

‘The provision-theory accepts the free market as the engine of economic growth. But, just as Clause 4 socialism once saw the state as the proper provider of goods and services through ownership of the means of production, so the provision-theorists of Brownian New Labour see the state as the proper provider of public services and of well-being through direction and control.’

Yet as Blair has made plain, state provision is not central to New Labour’s vision. It’s not even peripheral. New Labour has rolled back the frontiers of the state further than Thatcherism ever dared, from the privatisation of prisons to open up the NHS to private contractors.

‘The Cameron Conservative framework-theory of the state is fundamentally different … The framework theory of the modern state sees government as having two fundamental roles: to guarantee the stability and security upon which, by common consent, both the free market and well-being depend; and, much more controversially, to establish a framework of support and incentive which enables and induces individual citizens and organisations to act in ways that fulfil not merely their own self-interested ambitions but also their wider social responsibilities.

‘It is in emphasising this second duty of government that Cameron Conservatism distinguishes itself radically from the provision-theory of Brownian New Labour.’

Not so sure it does, Oliver. The last soundbite could equally well have been spoken by a Blairite of the Blears ilk as by a Conservative theorist. The serious twenty-first century left will have to construct a counter-hegemony to the common sense of both.

Three out of ten for the political sociology essay. And two of those marks are simply for having the chutzpah to try it on.

Oliver Letwin versus historical materialism? Bit of a no-brainer, really.

Conservative backbencher Graham Brady – the man who quit as Europe spokesman last May because he opposed party policy on grammar schools – reckons that his party’s leader isn’t going down well in Middle England. Brady argues:

"The changes David Cameron has made in the Conservative Party have been very successful in some places, and have been better at reaching out to a more liberal, metropolitan mindset.

"But they have not been making the same impact further away from London - in the north, in the Midlands, in places which really are an absolutely key electoral battlefield if we're going to win a general election.”

As a paid-up north London muesli belt socialist – albeit one who once had close ties to a small town in the east Midlands - I can’t help suspecting he is right.

I have always thought that not giving Kenneth Clarke the top job was the Tories’ worst tactical mistake of the 1990s. That brand of jazz-loving, pint-drinking, panatella-smoking Hush Puppy-clad pot-bellied bonhomie would have been just the persona to win over provincial good blokes across England.

It now looks as if the Europe-obsessed wingnuts of the Tory right will cause a few ructions this autumn, most likely around such standard hot button issues of law and order and tax cuts. Perhaps we’ll even see some ugly racism thrown in as a sideline.

Good. It will be helpful to remind everybody that underneath that Clinique for Men-doused metrosexual visage that Cameron so effortlessly affects, the Conservatives are still viscerally the Nasty Party.

David Cameron's front-bench MPs and peers hold more than 115 paid directorships and other outside jobs, in addition to their political roles, research by the FT has revealed …

"But you don't want a political class where all you have is narrow political experience and the only people who can afford to do it are those who are privately wealthy."

What a bloody weak excuse. At £60,000 a year, MPs are comfortably in the upper decile of salary earners. I haven’t got the stats to hand, but a wedge like that probably places them in the top 2-3% of the population.

It’s a very old socialist argument, but MPs do not need, say, £150,000 a year to function as part of the political system. They should be on an average wage, without other sources of income that could generate conflicts of interest. That’s the only way they’ll ever experience what impact their policies have on the rest of us.

How interesting to learn from the Electoral Commission website that an individual by the name Andreas Heeschen has donated £58,000 to the Conservative Party over the last year.

That’ll be the bloke who nows owns Heckler & Koch, manufacturer of the fine submachine guns and assault rifles that aficionados believe to be the finest in the world. Same old Tories, eh?

He’d better watch out. New Labour knows just exactly how to deal with hecklers, especially those with German-sounding names. Ask Walter Wolfgang.

The erstwhile Earl of Ancram (pictured left: he does mean Dylan covers, apparently) is clearly having none of that touchy-feely cross-party co-operation malarkey so beloved of wussy former Monday Clubbers like John Bercow.

No, the avowedly neocon former deputy leader of the party wants to see a return to the verities of bare-knuckle straight-no-chaser Thatcherism:

"Now [Cameron] must begin to unveil the party's soul based on those core values, principles and beliefs that form the timeless make-up of that Conservative soul."

The snag is, that unveiled soul is not an especially pretty sight. Whatever image the Tories try to project, they retain one single unrelenting purpose: to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society.

In the 300 years for which they have in one form or another existed, the Conservatives have made it their business consistently to oppose reforms that meant even slight inconvenience to the rich, from the abolition of slavery to the 1832 extension of the vote to the ‘swinish multitude’, from the Factory Acts right down to the minimum wage.

In 1914, they came closer to leading the armed overthrow of British democracy than the Communist Party of Great Britain in its wildest dreams.

When Ancram warns the Tories against appearing ashamed of their history, this is the history to which he is referring.

True, there have been sporadic periods in which they departed ever so slightly from the script. They were, for instance, fully signed up participants in the welfare state/Keynesian economics consensus from the 1950s through to the late 1970s. But let us not forget that it was also the Tories who, from 1979 onwards, overturned that framework.

In the process, they dragged the British polity to the far right of the European spectrum, a space it had not previously occupied since the Napoleonic wars.

Whatever image they try to project in the twenty-first century, the Tories today remain pretty much true to the history Ancram commends: they are reactionary, authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-European zealots, out of touch with the modern world, committed to the gradual erosion of state benefits, hostile to public transport and trade unions, and elitist on education.

In Marxist terms, they remain the main enemy.

The phrase ‘landslide victory’ is one of those tired clichés the journalistic style books advise hacks not to use. But one Daily Telegraph writer yesterday neatly turned it on its head, by proffering the opinion that Cameron’s Conservatives – 11% behind in the polls – face ‘landslide defeat’ at the next election.

After an initial surge in the polls after DC took charge, support has now fallen back to the point where he has no more backing than any of his string of ineffectual predecessors. His personal approval rating is just 21%.

If it wasn’t for my overwhelming political animosity to all Tories - all the time - I’d almost be tempted to feel sorry for the multimillionaire Old Etonian reformed cokehead. Is there actually anything he can do to restore Conservative fortunes?

Whether Cameron really and truly wants to change the Tory Party, or simply to pretend to the wider public that he has changed it, I’ll leave to better-placed observers. But after a decade out of office, it seems pretty clear that the activist base is irreformably locked in a Maastricht-era ‘bastard’ mindset.

The rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now. That is about the sum total of the political ideas that they express. Or express in public, anyway. The crude ‘nigger minstrel’ racism stuff perforce remains sotto voce.

Compare this to the situation in the Labour Party circa 1989, when it too had not seen the inside of Ten Downing Street for ten long years. The long march to the right was already well advanced.

Sure, there was plenty more to come in the early 1990s. But the streets surrounding Walworth Road were already so littered with dumped socialist principles – from unilateral disarmament to the extension of public ownership – that there was barely room to swing a red flag.

The dilemma for Cameron is that are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers. Burning a copy of the New Labour CD risks losing all that.

However much Cameron wants to donate the Nasty Party’s filthy Thatcherite hand-me-downs to Oxfam, there is no guarantee that new boots and panties will generate greater returns. Whatever he says in his speech this afternoon, a new conservative party with new priorities probably isn’t a runner.

Remember the derision in which posh Tory Chris Patten was once widely held for his resort to such demotic expressions as ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘porkies’?

Now things have got to the point where even posher Tory David Cameron can argue that Gordon Brown ‘bottled it’ in not calling an election, and nobody deems that worthy of comment.

Well, I do. As someone who really was born within the sound of Bow Bells, I have to register my objection to an Old Etonian worth £30m talking like he's rehearsing for a bit part in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Gordon Bennett, that geezer does me crust in sometimes. Leave it aht, mate.

Sadly, there are few working-class East London MPs left on the Labour benches capable of convincingly proffering the obvious Cockney proletarian response, delivered in a loud aggressive tone while clutching a broken beer glass: ‘Cameron, you bleedin' slag. D’you want some? D’you want some, eh?’ [Female noises off: ‘Leave ‘im, ‘e ain’t wurf it …].

At this rate, it cannot now be long before one of the Lib Dem leadership contenders reminds us that there is no black in the Union Jack. House!

Nigel Hastilow - pictured left - knew damn well what he was doing with his recent invocation of a 1968 speech from the Rt Hon J Enoch Powell MP. This was a straightforward attempt to find the Nasty Party’s clitoris.

This man, remember, is not some boy racer from Conservative Future, suddenly blurting out his true beliefs after six pints of pop on a Friday night at Romford Tory Club.

He is – or rather, was until he stepped down this morning – an adopted Conservative Party parliamentary candidate for a constituency near to Powell’s old Wolverhampton stomping grounds, and a former editor of one of Britain’s most influential regional newspapers.

And as Hastilow is well aware, Enoch was wrong. The River Tiber isn’t flowing with much blood. Britain hasn’t built its own funeral pyre. It is today a far more tolerant and less racist place than it was three or four decades ago.

But what was most offensive of all in Hastilow’s article was the subtext. Powell’s arguments were based on crude racist stereotyping, which linked the likelihood of people committing crime or being ‘feckless’ to the colour of their skin or their country of origin. Neither is a matter of choice for any of us.

There do exist political parties for people with views of this nature. Perhaps Mr Hastilow would be happier if he joined one of them.

It’s not that I’d normally exult in anybody’s death, you understand. I'm too much of a humanist for that kind of thing. While I recall being distinctly not sorry to hear word of the demise of Pinochet, for instance, I wasn’t jubilant, either. And of course, nothing that Thatcher - pictured - did remotely compares to the wickedness of the Chilean dictator.

The thing is, with me and Maggie, it’s personal. I am part of that generation of leftists that takes the Elvis Costello track ‘Tramp the dirt down’ – quite possibly the most concentrated dose of animosity and bile directed towards a living politician ever to make it onto vinyl - as something of an anthem.

It now may not be long before they do ‘finally put her in the ground’, as the ditty goes. The Iron Lady is currently – how can I say this kindly? – not in a good way. Now 82, she has lived on her own since the death of her husband five years ago, and according to more than one account, is rather partial to a drop of the hard stuff. Last month, she had to spend a night in London’s St Thomas hospital, after being taken unwell.

That’s why I was intrigued to pick up the Daily Telegraph this morning and read an article by Andrew Roberts, titled ‘Margaret Thatcher, an inspiration for today and tomorrow’. It’s not a one-off, either, but billed as ‘the first in a special series’. What's more, starting this Saturday, a set of eight CDs celebrating her life and achievements will be given away with the paper. Memo to self: collect the set.

Of course, the Telegraph is not popularly known as the Torygraph for nothing. Not only is it in the Conservative loop, it is pretty much the Conservative loop. So why the sudden outburst of Thatchstalgia? It couldn’t possibly be an attempt to prepare the nation for some sad, sad news expected some time in the not too distant, could it? Fingers crossed.

The quasi-religious tone of Roberts’ piece will make interesting reading for anyone familiar with Marx’s 18th Brumaire; the longing for a bonapartist Man on Horseback – or Woman on Horseback, of course – is palpable. Britain is facing social breakdown and economic ruin; who can save us now?

Just as in 1979 a hard-headed, realistic approach to tackling Britain's problems was urgently required, so is it today. Rather than feeling nostalgic for the certainties of the Eighties, Britain desperately needs another leader who will think, argue and act as decisively as Margaret Thatcher did then.

As someone who lived through the 1980s, I have rather a different take. My abiding memory of the decade is the planned step-by-step destruction of a kinder, gentler social democratic Britain that created the society – and thus the social problems – that we have now.

In particular, the degree of economic competence Roberts accords Thatcher at various points in his panegyric is perplexing, given his high standing as a historian. No administration in British history has inflicted such misery on so many in the name of misguided textbook economic dogma. A return to inflation in excess of 20% and three million on the dole would constitute a funny kind of national salvation.

Once Mrs Thatcher does get the obligatory state funeral, I’m sure someone – maybe even in the Daily Telegraph - will come out with the clichéd remark that we will not see her like again. I, for one, will be entirely glad of that.

A central aspect of David Cameron’s message is that the Conservative Party has changed. It is now, we are told, environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism.

Yesterday – as part of a conscious attempt to appeal to progressive voters – the multimillionaire Old Etonian grandson of a baronet was even claiming that the Tories are now more committed than Labour to the eradication of childhood poverty. Welcome to the new cuddly centre-right.

And even speaking as someone who came out of the 1980s with a visceral loathing for Conservatism and everything it represents, it seems idle to insist that there are no differences between then and now.

Perhaps I shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

Being an openly gay Tory MP during the Thatcher years would not have been an option, for instance. Nowadays, nobody is bothered about Alan Duncan’s civil partnership.

There are even signs are that the once substantial minority of rather nasty racists present among the Tories’ local level activist base are much diminished. I have no reason to disbelieve the official assurances that the leadership was glad to see the back of Bob Spink, the clearly racist MP who recently defected to UKIP.

Yet clearly the old class instinct is still there. Even as his boss was pushing his credentials as the only true friend of poor kiddies, his sidekick George Osborne announced that the Tories are considering a further toughening of employment law following the recent spate of industrial action.

Workers, Osborne insultingly claimed, go on strike ‘at the drop of a hat’. This is nonsense, of course. Indeed, the degree of detachment from reality inherent in this statement is quite remarkable for a serious politician.

For a start, thanks to the anti-union laws that formed a key plank of Thatcherism’s offensive against the working class, it takes weeks to go through all the legal hurdles necessary to take lawful industrial action.

You can see the impact in the statistics. The total number of strike days taken last year, at just over 1m, is minimal compared to the average of 12.9m in the 1970s and 7.4m in the 1980s.

The truth is, Britons have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country. When Labour was elected in 1997, employment rights were a national disgrace. Even after Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act, they remain arguably the worst in the EU. Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message.

Unions are marginalised, little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Rather than extending existing restrictions, there is a need to repeal the 1980s class war legislation and replace it with a charter of positive employment rights.

However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, their project remains that of providing a political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society.

That’s why they have opposed everything in history that has helped the poor at the slight expense of the rich, from the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts right through to the minimum wage. However slick the marketing, they remain at bottom the nasty party.

Historically, the acid test of a Labour government has always been this; what have been the acts of omission and commission done that the Tories will feel impelled to rectify next time they get the keys to Number Ten?

Drawing up a balance sheet of the period from 1997 to date, the answer this time round is surely very little. One of the reasons that Cameron has had such difficulty in defining a philosophically coherent vision is that Labour has ensured that very few points on the ruling class wish list remain unaccomplished. For the right, there are no particularly urgent tasks to hand.

So the odds are that the Cameron government of 2010 will thankfully not evince the sort of radicalism radiated by Thatcher once she got warmed up. That woman was on a mission from God to smash trade unionism, privatise nationalised industries and wipe out Britain’s manufacturing base in the interest of the City. Bereft of divine instruction, Cameron - by contrast - will just have to busk.

The handover will mark an alternation within a consensus, parallel to what was seen during the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan era. But this time round, the consensus is a very different one, based as it is on the free market and social liberalism rather than social liberalism and the welfare state.

Cameron and Co are not going to hike the gay age of consent back up to 21, reverse devolution or scrap the national minimum wage. Nor will there be any policies as monumentally stupid as the poll tax.

In short, lefties are not going to hate the 2010s nearly as much as we hated the 1980s. Doubtless we will find plenty to disapprove of, just as we have disapproved of much that has been undertaken by Blair and Brown. But for most people, Cameronism will amount to little more than Blairism without the all too occasional cherry on top.

Sadly, these are not my words, but rather a verbatim quote from John Stuart Mill. Such incisive invective would probably have made the Victorian philosopher a great blogger.

The tag of ‘the stupid party’ has accordingly stuck to the Tories for the last 150 years or so. Surprisingly, for the most part supporters have seemed to revel in what was clearly intended as a put-down.

By contrast, the left – for better or worse – has always attempted to ground what it does in political philosophy. Even British Labourism - unrelentingly theoretically backwards by continental standards and positively frightened of Marxism - has produced Anthony Crosland, Stuart Holland and Will Hutton.

Conservatives, by contrast, have rarely bothered with all that pointy-head book reading nonsense. There is an argument that, historically, the Conservative Party has been primarily a vehicle through which a layer of the ruling class ran the country on the basis a pragmatic platform that could be made up as they went along.

That strategy was not without success; after all, the Stupid Party governed Britain in the twentieth century for more years than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled Russia.

Somewhere in the 1970s, that changed. Although the 1970 Heath administration half-heartedly flirted with ideas, it was only from 1979 that fashionable rightist –isms were elevated to the level of policy, in the form of a clearly identifiable Thatcher project.

Yet the task of devising such a project was straightforward, because the needs of the ruling class in this period were clear; it was imperative to deploy the free economy and the strong state against the organised working class. It only remained to come up with a name for the process.

As I remarked a few posts back, David Cameron – pictured - will find it harder to define himself once he secures office in 2010. Perhaps he will have little need for originality; New Labourism kept the main elements of the Thatcher settlement in place, if perhaps with a little sugar coating. Now the baton passes back to the blue team.

Yet as an article in the Financial Times points out today, the Conservatives certainly are seeking some kind of intellectual content to what they will do once they are back in charge:

The Tory leader believes his immediate predecessors failed to impose a coherent philosophy on the party, instead filling manifestos with mismatched pledges chosen for their perceived electoral appeal.

In a telling comparison, Mr Cameron last week asserted: “We are beginning to win the battle of ideas in the way the Conservative party won it at the end of the 1970s.”

The article goes on to list ‘the thinkers who are reshaping the party’, who are said to include Oliver Letwin, Michael Gove, Steve Hilton, Nick Boles and George Osborne. Much attention is paid to the role of the think tank Policy Exchange, which is financially backed by Microsoft, BAE, Tesco and ‘wealthy individuals’.

Yet the underlying difficulty remains. Policy Exchange’s ideas seem to be a pick ‘n’ mix grab bag borrowed from the centre-right in other countries. Rehashing the latest hare-brained educational funding reform from Sweden with a dash of additional privatisation thrown in does not a platform make.

There seems little that can be described as an overarching theme; the quest for a defining Big Idea is proving as elusive as it did when New Labour briefly toyed with the concept after Blair got the top job.

It still remains to be seen whether the wonks can deliver the goods. The way the electorate feels right now, the simple expedient of not being the Labour Party is probably enough to see Cameron get the keys to Number Ten.

Meanwhile, he can muddle along, knocking an unpopular government policy here and camping it up for the benefit of the Daily Mail readership there. But for now, intellectually coherent conservatism can still be regarded as an oxymoron.

The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor did the hapless Tory backbenchers, for that matter. It would have been a damned impertinence to subject Baron Home of the Hirsel, fourteenth Earl of Home, to that kind of inconvenience.

Instead, a handful of leading Conservative figures selected Sir Alec for the job, by a process only paralleled by the mechanisms for choosing a new Pope.

They say Sir Alec was a good chap and a jolly nice fellow and all that. But as a paid-up, grouse-shooting, not particularly bright member of the upper class, he was very obviously out of touch with ordinary voters. Labour was quick to realise that, and leader of the opposition Harold Wilson hammered home the point. Repeatedly.

A year later, Wilson was in Number Ten. The Tories had been ousted from office after 13 years, with class politics one of the major reasons. From then on, the Tories were determined to broaden their appeal.

Home’s replacement, Edward Heath, became the first grammar school boy to lead the Conservatives. Later, things got more plebeian even than that, with the job later going to a petit bourgeois grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the son of a garden ornament manufacturer who went bust, and even a kid from a comp in Rotherham.

Until now, that is. As if to illustrate the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, the Old Etonians are back in charge of the Tories. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an OE with deep family roots in the ruling classes of several nations, has just been elected mayor of London.
Meanwhile, the party is headed by David Cameron, offspring of a stockbroker and the daughter of a Baronet, making him fifth cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. He is thought to be worth £30m.

Labour has historically been the party that represents the majority of society against the elite, so all this should present it with an open goal. I mean, Wilson was nobody’s idea of a prole, but he was still able effectively to highlight what the Tories are and who they represent.

But you can bet on one thing. Labour today - ‘ideologically neutral’ New Labour, with its schoolgirl crush on the super-rich - won’t try anything of the sort. That would smack of class politics, and we can’t be having any of that, can we? Not even if the other side are most insistent on its reintroduction.

This article first appeared as a guest post on Drink Soaked Trots. I am recycling it as I am too flat-out busy to post something new today. But watch out for some reflections on Crewe & Nantwich over the bank holiday weekend, plus a possibly controversial guest post from one of the Left List's media advisers.

I recently caught Martin Scorcese’s new flick Shine a Light - a straightforward rockumentary treatment of a Rolling Stones gig - at London’s IMAX cinema, which is fitted with the largest screen found anywhere in Britain.

On the way home, I remarked to my partner that a former underpass near Waterloo Station, surrounded on all sides by busy roads, is quite a curious place to build an upmarket entertainment venue.

‘Don’t you remember when it used to be Cardboard City?’ she asked. You housing professionals never let go, even on a Saturday night.

Cardboard City - for those not old enough to remember it - was the flipside of the yuppie 1980s, a visible manifestation of the consequences of Tory housing policy in easy walking distance of Parliament and 10 Downing Street.

The ‘right to buy’ was certainly popular with council tenants able to meet mortgage payments, and helped cohere the Tories’ electoral base. In the London Borough of Westminster, a Conservative local authority openly manipulated housing policy to gerrymander electoral boundaries.

Meanwhile, hundreds of homeless people had nowhere else to live but a cardboard box in a public underpass. As Old Etonian housing minister Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, famously remarked, one couldn’t even exit the opera without stepping over a rough sleeper.

Fast forward 20 years, and the current set of Old Etonians in charge of the Tories have launched the Homelessness Foundation, and even rounded up the heads of the major homelessness charities to sit on the advisory panel.

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps admits that ‘homelessness has not classically been considered a right-of-centre issue’. Well, there’s a reason for that, Mr Shapps; for decades now, your party has done a pretty good impression of frankly not giving a damn.

Of course, the Conservative Party insists that everything’s different now, and that under David Cameron, it has essentially reincarnated as the Care Bear Bunch.

Things in politics are never static. Labour is almost unrecognisable by comparison to two decades ago, so automatic identification between the Conservatives then and now cannot be a valid exercise.

Nor do I blame the bosses at the Big Issue, Shelter and Crisis for playing ball with the opposition’s latest initiative. After all, they need to keep in with the party now almost certain to form the next government.

But have the Tories really changed? I’ll believe it when I see it.

But David Davis’s clever tactical feint of a resignation will substantially discomfit New Labour after yesterday’s vote for 42-day detention without trial. SAS Boy – pictured - has managed to outflank Labour from the left, and on a civil liberties issue, too. For the first time since rejoining the party 18 months ago, I am seriously questioning whether I did the right thing.

It would be wrong to dismiss the gambit simply as cheap populism. According to polling evidence, 69% of the public approve of the government’s proposals. That is worth bearing in mind, given that absolutely everyone I mix with in bien pensant North London circles is without exception aghast at the development.

Let us not be too hasty to build the guy up as a consistent and principled defender of basic democratic rights, though. His political views - especially his espousal of the death penalty and opposition to gay equality legislation - are sufficiently authoritarian to place a question mark over this afternoon’s sudden outburst of libertarian rhetoric.

As the Daily Telegraph reported this morning, much of the motivation in all of this is to reassert the factional position of the Tory hard right – and with it Davis’s long-term leadership ambitions - against the Cameroons.

Purely from a partisan standpoint, Labour supporters will welcome the potential re-emergence of trench warfare within the Tory camp. Yet such is the gravity of this question that a purely partisan response does not suffice.

It is indisputably the case that on the narrow point at hand – that of 42-day detention – Davis has the correct political position; the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, a number of ostensible soft leftists included, has the wrong one.

Part of me almost admires the gesture he is making. In so far as it will keep up the pressure on the government to rescind the disgraceful legislation that the Commons carried last night, I'd even go as far as to call it a good thing. But a gesture it remains, and a deeply opportunistic one at that.

Nor will this performance a one off; spindoctors confirm that this theme will be central to Conservative agitation and propaganda over the summer months.

Notions of ethics have been central to western philosophy ever since Socrates, of course, and arguably constitute the basis on which political theory is grounded. Political thinkers of all stripes have historically evoked such concepts.

The trouble is, the clash of opinion over what is moral and what is not remains sharp. The right’s understanding of what constitutes the good society is necessarily far removed from that of the left.

Cameron offered the example of obesity. Yes, of course it is reasonable to ask most push the message that those who are overweight through lax lifestyle, rather than medical factors, to shape up. This is not to endorse the cult of size zero, but simply common sense. I write as someone currently trying to lose a stone and a bit to get my body mass index back under 25, and getting there slowly.

But short of providing and publicising the information that people need to make an informed choice, what else can a government do? Much as Cameron might mouth off against the evils of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges on tantalising display near WH Smith checkouts, it is unlikely that a Tory government will introduce restrictions against their consumption. Exhortation is as far as it can possibly go.

The point of the speech becomes apparent when you get to the paragraph decrying ‘the decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification’

These are all – in themselves, and at the abstract level – indisputably good things. Who is going to put their hands up and profess themselves to be against virtue or self-respect? Sure, it’s better to be responsible rather than irresponsible; nobody advocates blindfold jaywalking on the M1 while under the influence of alcohol.

But coming from a party with a distinguished track record in deliberately engineering mass unemployment as a weapon of class warfare, the ‘stand on your own two feet’ message is automatically suspect. It all too easily shades into a hatred for the undeserving poor.

The latest Tory sales pitch has purposely adopted the language of the ‘back to the 1950s’ brigade. Alright, Cameron doesn’t actually call for the restoration of national service and the return of the birch in junior schools, but the subtext is there, alright.

An ideologically self-confident left would have no trouble slugging it out with the Tories on Cameron’s chosen battleground. After all, there is a huge difference between morality, as represented by an individual freely making the choice to live his or her life by a certain code, and moralism, the wish to set down a moral code to which all others must comply.

He tells author Dylan Jones: ‘[J]ust as Margaret Thatcher mended the broken economy in the 1980s, so we want to mend Britain’s broken society.’ You have to laugh, don’t you?

For starters, I’m not sure where the idea that the 1980s Tories were somehow economically competent came from in the first place. As someone who lived through the last 18 years that party spent in government, I seem to remember the two deepest recessions of the entire post-war period, interspersed by an artificial inflationary boom, with high unemployment that Britain has yet to overcome one of the few constants of the period.

Rather than ‘mend a broken economy’, Thatcher took a social democratic Britain that functioned, albeit with undeniable difficulties, and injected a lethal dose of neoliberalism that smashed it to pieces.

The roots of the problems we face now can almost without exception be traced back to the 'no such thing as society' decade, when all the emphasis was on individualism rather than social responsability.

If exploitation in the workplace has increased massively, yet millions of workers are too cowed to organise collectively to improve their lot, that is because of the systematic weakening of trade unionism that was a core aspect of the Thatcher platform.

If there is intractable poverty in the face of sharply rising inequality, that is because of the continued roll-back of the welfare state that started under Thatcherism.

Homelessness was not a major feature of our towns and cities before the mass sale of council housing, while pockets of intractable long-term unemployment were few prior to the deliberate deindustrialisation of the Midlands and the North.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Or something like that; BoJo can tell you what it means. Alternatively, if you prefer your aphorisms in English rather than Latin, a sign frequently displayed in china shops often tells punters: ‘you broke it, you own it’. Perhaps Cameron’s words unwittingly reflect that maxim?

George Osborne’s piece for the Guardian this morning reads as if has succeeded in getting the middle class Labour electorate back to his place for a coffee. He’s dimmed the lights, and a well-worn Marvin Gaye compilation CD can be heard playing softly in the background as the espresso machine goes about its lawful business.

Now all he needs to do is say the right things, and he’s home and dry. So the smooth talking bastard starts muttering all the words a North London Labour voter longs to hear; progressive goals, baby. Social justice. Fairer society.

Don’t you just hate ‘growing inequality, falling mobility and rising poverty’? Hey, me too. Wow, we have so much in common.

OK, so he can’t help sounding a little glib, perhaps that bit too studied. But as we all know, by the time things get this far, the routine usually works, provided only that the intended conquest is half-drunk and up for it anyway.

That is what is so worrying; having been ignored and neglected by their political partner so long, left-of-centre public sector Guardianista types are bound to be feeling a bit vulnerable and perhaps even flattered by the attention. Will they be able to resist a night of illicit Tory passion?

What we have before us is a textbook example of triangulation, the US-originated technique of taking the values held most dearly by your opponent’s electoral base and then proclaiming them as your own. Dick Morris would have been proud.

The article is nicely ghosted, too. It opens with an attack on New Labour from the soft left, and from there the rhetoric just doesn’t let go. By the time a Tory shadow chancellor – and I’ll repeat that job title just to make the point: A TORY SHADOW CHANCELLOR – denounces the working of the unfettered free market economy, one is left feeling slightly breathless at the chutzpah of it all.

Osborne comes on like nothing so much as Polly Toynbee in drag, and he's, like, totally ready to lead. You could almost imagine him delivering these sentiments in a speech at the annual Compass Robin Cook Memorial Conference and bringing the audience to its feet. Oh Norman Tebbit, that thou shouldst live to see this hour.

Much of the cleverness is in the way that Osborne cuts so much with the traditional Croslandite grain. Blair and Brown have ‘dismally failed to deliver social justice’. This is indisputably the case.

By pointing to the real failings of the last 11 years, as judged from a social democratic perspective, Osborne has ideologically disarmed his target in a masterful display of fancy footwork.

Any cogent political case against the brand of Conservatism cannot help but simultaneously be a critique of what New Labour has done in office for the last decade and more.

For instance, Osborne insists: ‘We know that redistribution alone, as the sole policy tool to tackle poverty, has failed.’ Well, of course it has failed, if redistribution takes the form of redistribution from the working and middle classes to the super-rich, as it has under New Labour.

The politically sophisticated can read between the lines easily enough. ‘New fiscal framework’ translates as vicious and sustained public spending cuts, ‘tackling the root causes of poverty by harnessing the private and voluntary sectors’ equates to further privatisation of the welfare state.

But we’ve all ended up in bed with people we really shouldn’t have ended up in bed with. If he keeps on dressing up Tory chat-up lines in Labourspeak, the Old Etonian smoothie has every reason to expect a decent hit rate.

Marquand - pictured left - had resigned his seat to become his mentor’s chief bag carrier.

Jenkins – often nicknamed Woy, on account of his tendency to pronounce the letter R the way the rest of us pronounce W – announced: ‘I am leaving without rancour’. Quick as a flash, Dennis Skinner quipped in that Derbyshire accent of his: ‘I thought you were taking Marquand with you!’ Boom boom.

A classic one liner indeed, but perhaps a little unfair. This man probably qualifies as Britain’s leading living social democratic intellectual. Think of him, if you will, as the Ideas Man behind Polly Toynbee.

Over a long career in politics and academia, Marquand has displayed a definite ideological consistency, to an extent that makes him something of a broken record. It’s just that this consistency that has found expression through a bewildering variety of vehicles.

A Labour MP from 1966 to 1977, he went on to join the breakaway Social Democratic Party, sitting on its leading bodies throughout its entire existence. By the early 1990s he had metamorphosed into an enthusiastic Blairite; these days, he is an equally enthusiastic critic of Blairism, and was one of the 20 founder-members of soft left pressure group Compass. Now, it seems, he has rather taken to that nice young man David Cameron.

In an article in the Guardian today, he chides the left for habitually deriding DC as a closet Thatcherite. That is a serious misunderstanding, he reckons: Cokehead is actually a ‘Whig imperialist’, a term that appears to be of Marquand’s own devising, and moreover one that has not found widespread acceptance outside his own writings.

As befits a good pet concept, the term is conveniently malleable: for today’s purposes, it seems to mean what the rest of us would refer to as a One Nation Tory of the Baldwin, Butler or Macmillan stripe.

In other outings, Churchill is upheld as the main exemplar of this strand. Indeed, not so long ago, Marquand was arguing that Churchill-style Whig imperialism is nowadays ‘untenable’, as it does ‘not address the reality of a post-imperial Britain in a proto-federal Europe and therefore cannot mobilise the kind of support that would be necessary for a new paradigm to come into effect’.

Just hang on a minute, though. I seem to remember that as recently as 2003, Cameron was still a rightwing backbencher who mocked wind farms as ‘giant bird blenders’, called for ‘a massive road-building programme’, supported Section 28, and opposed the minimum wage.

True, he’s projecting a new image for electoral purposes, and very successfully too, it seems. But it’s quite clear what his gut instincts are, and ‘Whig imperialist’ seems an unnecessarily hifalutin way of describing a guy who is essentially just another Tory under the skin.

I expect the coming Conservative government that will be in office shortly will be rather more moderate than its 1980s predecessor. But that will be because that is what the ruling class requires of it, and not because of any inherent philosophical differences with the past.

But is that necessarily the case? Given the many notable incidents that studded Hezza’s long and illustrious career, many connotations are surely possible. Let me offer a number of alternative suggestions.

I think we can safely discount any desire to flounce out of the cabinet in a hissy fit over whether European or US interests are best placed to bail out a floundering UK helicopter operation.

Not only is this now a dead issue, but since 2004, Westland’s successor came 100% under the control of Finmeccanica of Italy. Ironically, then, Tarzan ultimately got his way on this one.

Nor can it mean the institution of a mass programme of pit closures, simply because there is no longer that much of a UK deep mining industry left to butcher.

Perhaps it indicates a barely suppressed desire to pick up the mace and swing it threatening in the general direction of Labour leftwingers innocently singing the Red Flag, forcing the speaker to suspend a parliamentary session, as Heseltine - pictured above - did in 1976.

But ultimately, I seem to remember that our man suffered a serious heart attack in Venice in 1993, leaving him temporarily wheelchair-bound. And where did this cardiac infarction take place?

In a hotel, of course. And that is a moment any of us would understandably want to avoid. Seen in that light, Miliband must be cleared on all charges of insubordination.

In a set piece interview with Sky – extracts here – he deftly counters the Great Clunking Fist’s accusations that he’s still wet behind the ears, pointing out that for all his experience, Gordon Brown has made rather a hash of things over the last year. There’s even the by now de rigeur sideswipe at New Labour from the left:

I just make this argument: who in the last year has thumped the poor and the working poor with abolishing the 10-pence tax rate? That was an appalling decision taken by a Labour prime minister.

Quite. Welcome to the world of Cameron’s Conservatives; environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism. Not the Nasty Party anymore.

This is a development that many on the left are having difficulties in coming to terms with. Most are arguing that the apparent transformation is purely presentational, and that underneath everything, there lurks an unreconstructed Thatcherite authoritarian.

That’s a line I have previously argued myself many times. As a student, I wrote long essays proffering Gramscian analyses of the exact composition of the Thatcherite historic bloc.

As a journalist in the 1990s, I sustained a minor cottage industry in populist denunciations of the Tories as a bunch of reactionary, racist, homophobic, authoritarian, narrow-minded, anti-European, gin-and-Jag belt golf-club bigots. It was easy copy.

And it probably is the case that a large chunk of the rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now.

But I’m starting to suspect that attempts to dismiss Cameron - pictured above - as ‘the same old same old’ are as wide of the mark as the Major government’s laughable initial efforts to brand Blair a closet ‘demon eyes’ socialist back in 1994 and 1995.

Electoral politics can and do reflect demographic changes; New Labour is the living proof of that. Perhaps we shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

The dilemma for Cameron is that there are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers.

On the other hand, the ruling class of the 2000s has different needs than the ruling class of the late 1970s. It doesn’t have to undermine a confident and assertive labour movement, and the game plan of liberalising the British economy, as commenced under Thatcherism, was largely completed under Blair. Ironically, it may now be that the time has come for a certain degree of re-regulation.

The arrival of Cameronism shows is now possible to combine social liberalism with the retention of a core political project of providing a political vehicle for the minority of wealthy people that control society, in a way that could not have been done three decades ago.

In short, the coming Cameron government will of course do lots of execrable and reactionary things that the left will have to oppose. Despite the man’s protestations to be a progressive politician, it is unlikely to do very much that we would regard as progressive.

But there is little I can contemplate him doing that would reopen the deep social polarisation that split British society so deeply in the Thatcher years.

He will have a different mission statement, if only because a different mission statement is required of him. Simply to present the Tory leader as Maggie masquerading as Morrissey would be a mistake.