The Telegraph is in a Time-Warp

The Telegraph page about the bus in a tornado contains a link to a rather elderly article entitled "Can the Conservative Party recover?" and dated October 2002. Bearing in mind where UK politics is now I think a look at this article may be in order for all the pundits who are now predicting the permanent decline of the Labour party. Here's the end of the piece:

"Are the Tories as badly off as Labour in 1984?
"In 1984," said Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Manchester Gorton, "Labour was in a truly appalling state. Unless it had dealt with its problems, it would never have formed a government again. Even so, it was nowhere near as bad as the Conservative Party today.

"Back then, there were still large groups of people who could not do without the existence of the Labour Party: the poor, the unemployed and the ethnic communities, not to mention the trade unions. Today, I can't think of any substantial group of people whose interests would be brushed aside if the Conservative Party didn't exist.

"All sections of the community are now represented by the Labour Party. Tony Blair has created a broad tent and, whereas Mrs Thatcher's attitude was: 'If you're not for us, you're against us', Blair's attitude is: 'Those who are not against us may, one day, be with us'.

"The present Tory party doesn't understand this country as Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher did. They are no longer in the broad stream of society."

Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, takes a different view. "The Tories are in nothing like such a bad position as we were in 1984, when, like them, we had been out of power for five years," he said. "At that point, we were in total disarray, There was blood all over the place. We were fighting the Trotskyites and the leadership was running scared.

"The Tories of today have seen nothing like that. They are in a calm sea compared to the one we were in then. If you look at their situation, they are agreed on Europe and on the need for modernisation. And they're not like we were, blaming the electorate for the fact that we had lost twice.

"I also think Iain Duncan Smith is more easily seen as a prime minister than Mrs Thatcher when she first became leader of the Opposition. After her first year in that job, the informed opinion in Westminster fell about laughing at the idea that she could ever be in Downing Street.

"The Tories always pride themselves on having the qualities of statecraft, but the first of those qualities is a sense of history - and, at the moment, they have lost their sense of history.""