A few years ago TRG was one of the proud members of an organisation called Conservative Mainstream. Fearful of the rightward drift of the Tory Party after its catastrophic election defeat in 1997, Mainstream served as an umbrella for like-minded liberal Tory groups to coalesce under, and perhaps have greater weight. It even spawned a parliamentary offshoot – imaginatively called Parliamentary Mainstream – which contained a number of One Nation luminaries, and was chaired by Damian Green. Well, the Conservative party returned to the ‘mainstream’ and the organisation itself fell into abeyance. But it seems that mainstream Conservatism just doesn’t die, or indeed even appear in similar guises. For Tim Montgomerie, of Conservative Home, has now launched his own clarion call for a return to, er, mainstream conservatism, as a response to the party’s drift – well, leftwards.
Just as there was once a time when everyone claimed to be a ‘One Nation’ Conservative (even Margaret Thatcher deployed the phrase, though probably through gritted teeth and certainly without referencing the grand old man of Tory One Nationism, Benjamin Disraeli), now it seems we can’t move for fear of dislodging another squatter on the ground floor of mainstream conservatism. Of course, the whole thing is a bit of a fraud, for as Tim Montgomerie surely knows, there is no agreement on what constitutes mainstream Conservatism. Mr. Montgomerie’s mainstream conservatism is simply a front for the advancement of more New Rightist, Thatcherite ideas of the national liberal variety. It is a continuing sign of how concerned the Thatcherite right are with the direction of the Conservative Party, and it has usefully provoked a further debate about what it means to be conservative. The most recent salvoes fired, following Mr. Montgomerie’s pronouncement, are very ably summed up and linked to by Platform 10, whose own blogger Fiona Melville provides the most articulate, and convincing, of the responses.
In reviving the term Conservative mainstream, Mr.Montgomerie may not have done much for the consistency of that theme, but he has ensured that the debate about conservatism is kept very much on the front burner. Our own commitment now should be to join the debate with vigour, and continue to promulgate the ideas of One Nation conservatism (liberal is too wide and imprecise a designation here) which we believe to be part of the mainstream, in the wider party. After all, what else should mainstream conservatives be doing?
[This post is a slightly amended version from the original]
