Comprehensively Lost

Of course William Hague wants to legalise drugs. He comes from the Northern bourgeoisie originally, but he came up via the Oxford University Conservative Association and the Oxford Union.

Margaret Thatcher herself was never a supporter of drug legalisation. But it has always been an article of faith among her strongest supporters.

Thatcherism was not in fact a reassertion of the supposed respectability of the pre-1960s provincial and suburban middle classes, to which we now know that its archetype, Thatcher's own father, did not conform.

Rather, it expressed the desire of provincial and suburban middle-class boys, arriving at the swankier universities, to be allowed to behave in absolutely any way that they pleased, like David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, and the rest of the posh boys whom they encountered there and who mostly went on to run their party over their heads despite having shown little or no interest in it when seen from the perspective of the bookish boot-strappers.

Fast forward half a generation or so, and a sort of Eurocommunism did vaguely provide a kind of ideological framework for accommodation to that, in turn, by rather similar, if very slightly posher, types who wished to carry on defining themselves as fashionably leftish in their own minds. 

But the Conservative Party of Hague and then Cameron did not adjust itself to a New Labour project that had been defined by a highly superficial reading of Gramcsi as several degrees' remove. No, that project was itself an adjustment to the Conservative Party as defined by the Thatcherite demand that the sons of Rotherham soft drinks manufacturers be allowed to behave with the same irresponsibility and impunity as the Old Etonian members of the Bullingdon Club. For example, by taking drugs. Marxism Today merely provided the tools. If it had not done so, then something else would have done.

After all, the more "modernising" Labour Right of yesteryear had already done so. Scarcely a Conservative MP had voted against most of the social legislation of the Wilson Governments. On at least one occasion, more than half of the Conservatives on a Bill Committee had been with Roy Jenkins, not merely at Oxford, but at Balliol.

For a time, Jenkins was Shadowed at the Home Office by a very close friend and sometime employer, and another Balliol contemporary, with whose immensely aristocratic wife he was conducting a 40-year affair.

For almost as long, Jenkins was also carrying on with an American heiress who was married to his publisher, yet another Balliol contemporary who was a member of the first family of the Liberal Party and who sat for a time as a Liberal MP before being raised to the peerage. Welcome to "the centre ground".

Almost as an aside, ponder that an elected second chamber became Conservative Party policy immediately upon the election of Hague as Leader in 1997 (by then, he had already being calling for many years for the abolition of hereditary peers), and that same-sex marriage was the subject of an enthusiastic editorial in the Daily Telegraph at that time, being seen as a characteristically Conservative policy.

By contrast, the Blair and Brown Governments were ruling them both out from the despatch boxes of both Houses all the way up to the General Election of 2010, due to the need to keep peace with other important strands in Labour thinking. But by 1997, fully 21 years ago now, there was no other strand in Conservative thinking. All thinking Conservatives were like this.

The increasingly fashionable claim that the Conservative Party turned itself into a vehicle for Gramscian, Eurocommunist Blairism entirely misses the point. Even if not necessarily in the way intended, the observation that New Labour was about "turning Labour into the Tories" was spot on. Gramscian, Eurocommunist Blairism merely made it possible to do so while remaining on speaking terms with the Labour Movement until the Iraq War. But that is a whole other story.