“If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” That wisdom was not coined by Winston Churchill but it was popularised by him and it highlights an urgent task for the Conservatives as they struggle to establish a poll lead over Labour.
Parties on the right have too often aimed only for voters’ heads and given up on the challenge to contest more determinedly for their hearts. Such resignation amounts to a significant strategic failure. An unwillingness to fight for the moral high ground of politics means that generations of values-driven voters begin with a disinclination to support conservative and free market parties. It tips a country like Britain towards a politics where a large welfare state rather than free markets and strong civic institutions are seen as the underpinnings of a good society.
Only once in a while does a Conservative politician attempt to challenge the popular assumption that the left cares more than the right. In her 1988 speech to the Church of Scotland, Margaret Thatcher defended the pursuit of wealth creation with which the 1980s had become associated and had been caricatured as a “loadsamoney” culture. How, she argued, “could we respond to the many calls for help, or invest for the future, or support the wonderful artists and craftsmen whose work also glorifies God, unless we had first worked hard and used our talents to create the necessary wealth?” She wanted Britain to understand that the people who created wealth were at least as important to a country’s moral health as the people who distributed it. Three decades on, winning that argument is still a work in progress.
Last night Michael Gove, the government’s most innovative thinker, carried on where Mrs Thatcher had left off. Launching TheGoodRight.com, which aims to overturn the idea that Conservatives are hostile to government, he spoke with an expansiveness that is absent from the Tories’ general election campaign. He argued that voters shouldn’t be re-electing his party just because it would balance the books more quickly than Labour or because Ed Miliband couldn’t be trusted with office. Instead he made the case that the Tories were politics’ true progressives and had the best ideas to reduce poverty and inequality. It is a case his colleagues should be making, too.
Significantly Mr Gove defended government intervention and the importance of providing a safety net below which no person should fall. He celebrated anti-monopoly laws, parliament’s acts to improve factory conditions and investments in pensions and education as high points of conservative history. “We believe in the state,” he argued, but “as an emancipator.”
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While the state’s role should be limited it should be strong and ambitious in the tasks it does set itself: including preparing people for work and providing the infrastructure upon which economies advance. As education secretary, Mr Gove’s efforts to restore meaningfulness to exam grades met this test. Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms to prepare the unemployed for the world of work meet this test. So do the partnerships with Labour-run councils that Greg Clark is negotiating. These underpin George Osborne’s vision of a northern powerhouse to rebalance the economy.
Mr Gove’s removal as education secretary last year raised concerns about David Cameron’s enthusiasm for further education reform. The reshuffling of Nick Boles from the planning and housing brief and of Owen Paterson from environment posed the same question: is this a prime minister who is still ambitious to prepare Britain for the enormous challenges represented by globalisation and technological change? The boldness or timidity of the forthcoming Tory manifesto will provide us with the answer.