Long ago, in the blissful dawn of new Labour, The Economist magazine printed a glamour shot of blue-eyed Tony Blair on its front cover. The background was blue too, I think, and the coverline was absolutely inspired. "The strangest Tory never sold", it read. I've often been reminded of it during the rise and rise of David Cameron. There is still, to put it mildly, a certain mystery about what Cameron really stands for and really means. There is a sense that we are being sold something other than what appears, just as with the youthful Blair. As with Blair, whatever it is seems to be working so far. "Tory leader surges ahead of Brown as voters' choice", according to a YouGov poll last week. Admittedly, polls are unreliable. Admittedly, another poll last week suggested that Cameron was losing ground - particularly with women. All the same, no one can doubt that he has been, and is, cutting a definite dash. The Conservatives have been ahead of Labour, according to the YouGov poll, for six months in a row. This is rather encouraging for the Conservatives and there is certainly a mood of determined optimism among the Cameroons at the centre of things Tory. But among others, among big and small "c" conservatives, there is a mood here and there of uncertainty and even of suspicion. I cannot count the number of people I have talked to who will vote Conservative but wonder nervously what Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, really mean to do. Since what they say sounds so much like new Labour, the party faithful and Tory sympathisers have to persuade themselves that the Cameroons are Conservatives really and will prove to be so when the time comes. This unease was expressed in a debate last week run by Intelligence Squared at the Royal Geographical Society; the motion was "The Tory party is no longer conservative" and the hall was sold out. The party must be pleased that the motion was soundly defeated by Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, and Michael Gove MP, who presented conservatism as a big stretchy tent capable of sheltering all sorts from Enoch Powell and Macmillan to Thatcher and Boris Johnson. But there were a lot of awkward questions from the other side that were left unanswered. It is quite true, as both sides agreed, that conservatism is a disposition, not a dogma. There are few, if any, Tory articles of faith. But there are two convictions that do almost amount to Conservative dogma: a belief in freedom, as far as possible, and a related belief in a small state, as far as possible. In my life there has been a truly astonishing growth of the state and its power to direct our lives and a concomitant loss of freedom.
Socialist doctrines of egalitarianism and statism have made their long march through the institutions with great success. We are now regulated and inspected and monitored and filmed and taxed and credited and cross-questioned and bullied into orthodoxy to a degree that has become almost frightening. What is even more frightening is how widely and how easily it has been accepted. One would expect nothing less of the Labour party. From true Conservatives, however, one would have expected a passionate, tireless resistance.
We have not had it, at least not consistently. A terrible image of Virginia Bottomley springs to mind, lecturing us when she was health minister on the size and number of potatoes we should eat each week, as the incarnation of Conservatism gone horribly astray into unthinking statism. She would have fitted perfectly well into a new Labour cabinet.
One of the evil consequences of post-war statism in this country is that it has laid such intolerable burdens on public services that they are collapsing under the weight. Schools and jails and hospitals and social services - the things that voters care most about - are beginning to crumble.
If public services are to be rescued, they need to be freed from the over-weighty hand of the state. That does not (or need not) mean cutting the services; it means reforming their delivery. That, at least, is or ought to be a classic Conservative position. And it is the most important thing a future Conservative government should try to do.
Yet this central question seems to have become unmentionable. We hear almost nothing from the Cameroons about rolling back the state, and their language to and about public servants has become positively deferential. The Conservatives' 2005 review of waste in government spending is hardly mentioned, well considered and important though it was. No doubt it strays too near the dread work "cuts".
Only recently the Cameroons were quick to dissociate themselves from the party's own policy review document on tax because it used the C-word. Yet if one is honest, cuts must be conservative - cuts if not necessarily in tax, then certainly cuts in state intrusion, cuts in statist bureaucracy and cuts in politically correct agenda. That does not mean cuts in the money available for frontline public services and the relief of hardship - rather the reverse.
Of course it's obvious why Conservatives avoid the C-word. They won't get into office if they use it. It drives most voters into instant hysteria, especially public servants. And cunningly this government has created a huge constituency of public servants out there - 800,000 new jobs since 1997, with one in four people now working for the state - who have an understandable inclination to vote Labour. All that the Conservative party feels it can do about this in practice is to sound as new Labour as possible while hoping that traditional conservatives will not lose faith.
How depressing this is. In the debate, Moore, in his eloquent defence of the Tory party's conservatism, said that "trust is much more important than precisely what you are saying". How horribly that sounds like Blair's demand that the public should trust him: "I'm a pretty straight sort of guy."
--------