Cameron Must Ditch The Blairite Neocons

A real conservative, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writes:

Years ago there was a columnist – was it Hannen Swaffer in the Daily Herald? – who had a catchphrase: "I told them but they wouldn't listen." Anyone who writes about politics sometimes knows the feeling, but it's unusually oppressive for those of us who have tried to offer constructive advice to David Cameron and his team.

We told them to avoid the mistakes of the present government, to repudiate its economic strategy, to promise a foreign policy based on the British rather than the American national interest, to give a wide berth to customers such as Andy Coulson, and above all to bill themselves as the "Not the Tony Blair party". We told them, but did they listen? Did they hell.

In today's Guardian ICM poll, the Tories maintain a commanding lead at 41%, with Labour a pitiful 25%. In one very significant figure, Liberal Democrat voters would prefer Tories to Labour in government by 56% to 36%. Even Labour supporters know in their hearts that Gordon Brown just does not deserve to be re-elected.

And as we brace ourselves for a Tory government, along comes Michael Gove. I had no wish to return to the shadow education minister, but Michael's at it again. The man who once wrote: "I can't fight my feelings any more: I love Tony … all I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, what's not to like?" has just been interviewed in the Independent on Sunday, where John Rentoul begins with the arresting words "Michael Gove and I are Blairite ultras".

Asked whether he really wants to be called a Blairite in view of Blair's unpopularity, Gove replies: "He's not as popular as he deserves to be, and he's emphatically not as popular within Labour as he deserves to be – amazing ingratitude on their part." This view is shared, as it happens, by Gerald Kaufman, who has written here that Labour should "go down on their knees in thanksgiving for his achievements".

When politicians of both parties rebuke the rest of us for ingratitude, it pays to be on guard. Perhaps one can understand why Kaufman is so grateful to a leader whose election victories allowed him to remain in parliament and eligible to claim his antique rugs and flat-screen television on expenses, even if that meant voting for a war that Kaufman said both beforehand and afterwards that he didn't believe in.

But why should any honest Tory feel any gratitude or admiration whatsoever for Blair? Next year the Tories will be picking up the pieces left behind by a prime minister who presided for 10 years (with the support of his chancellor) over an illusory boom which, since it was in fact artificially fuelled by rocketing house prices and an explosion of household debt, was bound to end in bust. As Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor, says, George Osborne knows better than anyone that the next chancellor will have to raise taxes as well as slash spending, and it's hard to see why he should feel particularly thankful for the odium he is bound to incur.

Many ordinary Tories, as opposed to bumptious MPs, feel a visceral loathing for Blair. The Tories should be the party of constitutional government and individual freedom under a rule of law. As the damning evidence of four former cabinet secretaries reported in the Guardian on Monday reminds us, the last prime minister's assumption of presidential powers ruined cabinet government and gravely damaged our whole constitutional settlement. At the same time, Blair launched the most relentless assault on civil liberties since Lord Liverpool, and rubbed it in by sneering at "libertarian nonsense".

But, of course, we know why Gove really remains a Blairite ultra: "If you take the Tony Blair view on foreign policy, in terms of support for democracy abroad, then I certainly agree with that." This is at odds with Cameron, at least his better moments. He has said that we shouldn't be wedded to unconditional support for Washington, that "you can't drop democracy from 10,000 feet", and that he himself is "a liberal conservative, not a neoconservative".

And yet Gove – who is "happy to be called a neocon" – insists that Cameron has "given the strongest possible support for our mission in Afghanistan", which is "part of a broader struggle against Islamist fundamentalism". Those words must make anyone despair, and certainly think twice about voting Tory.

Before the 2004 American election, Matthew Parris – a sometime Tory MP and cavaliere servente to Margaret Thatcher – wrote that "George W Bush needs a second term at the White House", but his endorsement was backhanded. Aided and abetted by Blair, he said, Bush was conducting an "experiment whose importance is almost literally earth-shattering".

"I want to see that experiment properly concluded. The theory that liberal values and a capitalist economic system can be spread across the world by force of arms, and that [the US] is competent to undertake this task, is the first big idea of the 21st century. It should be tested to destruction ... There must be no room left for argument. The president and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves."

Well, five years later Parris can't complain. He got what he wanted. Few ideologies have ever been so utterly discredited as neoconservatism – or projects become so unpopular. I'm quite used to being in a minority, and often enough happy to be, but in this case mine is the voice of the majority. It's the neocons infesting the Tory party who espouse a deeply unpopular view.

Our lamentable adventure in Iraq is regarded as a terrible mistake by almost all voters, more than half of whom now want our troops withdrawn from the thankless and unwinnable war in Afghanistan as well. Brown's claim that we are fighting in Helmand to make British streets safer is so obviously absurd as to be embarrassing, and the prospects for "a struggle against Islamist fundamentalism" waged by military means throughout the Muslim world are not encouraging or appetising. Anyone for a new hundred years war?

An old political saw holds that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. That was at least partly true in 1979 and 1997, and it will be truer than ever next year. David Cameron may be confidently pondering which pieces of his furniture would fit in Downing Street. But might he not also think about offering us a real political choice, and make it clear that, whatever else he may be, he is not "Blair's heir"?

Oh, but he is.