The End of Neoconservatism: Part Three

But it is not in the United States that the neoconservatives have become most hegemonic. That dubious distinction belongs to the United Kingdom. An indivisible New Labour Project, now effectively led by David Cameron following the political death of Tony Blair, constitutes the electorally irremovable neoconservative junta trading under the names of New Labour, the Cameroons, the rising Orange Book Tendency within the Liberal Democrats, The Henry Jackson Society, the Euston Manifesto, and so forth. (It is extraordinary, but I have now been doing it for over a year, to sit in a Parsh Council meeting including three Tories yet to know that the only person in the room who wants David Cameron to become Prime Minister is a current Cabinet Minister's researcher.) But the ideology of which these are all the same expression has now collapsed. Presenting the rest of us with an unmissable opportunity.

After all, did anyone ever ask you if you wanted the political parties to merge in all but name, and that on a foreign, fringe and now failed basis? No one ever asked me if I wanted this. I don’t. And I bet that you don’t, either. But the only political party ever to have begun in the Westminster Village, and then attempted to spread out into the country at large, was the SDP. And look what became of that.

Instead, we need, in terms of impact, nothing less than a Reformation in British politics. But unlike the Reformation itself, it will be bottom-up rather than top-down, it will be directed at collapsed rather than thriving institutions, and it will therefore be massively popular, entirely without any need for imposition by force.

It will of course leave its recusants, notable for their tiny numbers, for their heavily intermarried families, for the social and cultural insulation provided by their fabulous wealth, for the lavishing of foreign honours on their most outspoken figures, for the fact that all their institutional manifestations are abroad, and for the fact that almost no one abroad (nor even many people here) has any notion that they exist.

If you want better than that for yourself, and for your house and lineage at least for the next three hundred years, then you will now cut all ties to New Labour, to the Cameroons, to the Orange Book Tendency, to The Henry Jackson Society, to the Euston Manifesto, and to anything else remotely redolent of neoconservatism.