1980s Tory boys now, The

Spectator, The, Jun 26, 1999 by Cowling, Maurice

Maurice Cowling considers a group of youthful Conservatives grown older

ENGLISH intellectual fashions are sometimes the work of dominant figures like Dickens or Macaulay, who seem to spring fully armed into the public eye without friends or predecessors. More often, they are the work of groups of friends who understand each other and have a common outlook. Oliver Letwin, in last week's Spectator, had an article based on his essay in Conservative Debates (published by the think-tank Politeia). The two authors of Conservative Debates - the other is John Marenbon - are members of such a group and have a common outlook which took shape in Cambridge in the 1980s, when some of them were disrespectful about some of the local gurus and, even as undergraduates and research students, made it clear that they intended to leave their mark on the public mind.

Oliver Letwin's father is an American who, after war service, settled in Britain, became Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and, for many years, has been a dignified, courteous and highly intelligent advocate of free-market economics. Letwin's mother, Shirley Robin Letwin, also an American, wrote books including The Pursuit of Certainty, taught the history of political thought (to, among others, Michael Portillo) and was an admirer both of Hayek and Oakeshott, and of Sir Keith Joseph and Lady Thatcher. Having decided to bring up the younger Letwin as an Englishman, the elder Letwins sent him to Eton, where he became a close friend of Charles Moore and Noel Malcolm, who then went with him to Cambridge where all three became friends of John Marenbon (from Westminster) and Harold James (from the Perse School, Cambridge).

Moore's first public performance was a Salisbury Group pamphlet entitled The Old People of Lambeth. A decade or so on the staff of Telegraph newspapers was then followed by a successful period as editor of The Spectator. Moore is now editor of the Daily Telegraph from which he has given much comfort to Conservatives in difficult times and is unique in not only being a Roman Catholic convert but also having as his proprietor another Roman Catholic convert.

Moore is sometimes accused of being a fogey and in public (by contrast, for example, with Niall Ferguson) sometimes lends weight to the accusation. He has also been accused of having created a camp atmosphere at The Spectator, though neither he nor anyone else in the group has ever been even remotely camp. Moore's fogeyism, where it is not a form of public awkwardness, is the decent, understated respectability which used to be an Anglican but has now also become a Roman Catholic characteristic. It is worth adding that the group is cosmopolitan as well as English by origin and marriage, has German, Polish, Jewish, Maltese and Russian as well as American and Irish connections and, in addition to Moore, includes two Catholic converts (after marriage to Catholic wives) and a lapsed Jewish atheist who admires the Church of England as an English institution.

Malcolm is the group's polymath - an accomplished writer about music, a leading Hobbes scholar, and the most learned, as well as the most reclusive, of commentators on foreign affairs. His histories of Bosnia and Kosovo contain fine examples of historical analysis, and have helped to persuade the public, rightly or wrongly, that the Kosovan conflict, far from being, as Mr Blair appears to believe, an instance of 'fascism' (i.e. of the Right), is in fact an aspect of President Milosevic's policy of propping up a dying Communist regime by putting himself, a figure of the Left, at the head of the Serbian desire to destroy Kosovan autonomy.

Of the remaining members of this Thatcherite 'gang', James is a liberal Conservative who, on the way to the Chair of Economic History at Princeton, has written a thoughtful book about Germany, an antiKeynesian book about German economic history and a massive history of the Deutsche Bank which, like Ferguson's history of Rothschild's, declines to approach finance capitalism with the paranoid alienation of historians of the Fabian generations; while Marenbon, whose grandparents were Russian and Polish Jews, is the husband of Sheila Lawlor, the Irish-Catholic director of Politeia, and is both a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a productive, learned and intelligent historian of mediaeval philosophy and theology.

Apart from Moore, who has recently become Lady Thatcher's authorised biographer, Letwin, the MP for Dorset West and now a shadow Cabinet Treasury spokesman, is the most political member of the gang. He worked for Lady Thatcher in Downing Street before working for Rothschild's and supported John Redwood's second attempt to become Conservative leader before switching to Mr Hague at the last moment. Conservative Debates is his own and Marenbon's constructive response to the disaster of May 1997.

In the first part of the pamphlet, Letwin employs the Oakeshottian argument that Conservatives should use a language which suggests, as against New Labour's 'mechanism' and 'modernity', a conception of mankind consisting of `homing creatures' who wish to be connected with their pasts and seek a `cultural richness . . . social texture and instinctive attachments' which New Labour lacks. In the second part, Marenbon accuses Letwin of being a follower of Burke (whom Letwin does not mention) and of sharing with the Prime Minister a desire to use political power to 'promote' a `way of life', whereas he, Marenbon, wishes the Conservative party to follow Mill rather than Burke into a `sceptical liberalism' which will `leave people with a large measure of liberty'.