[It is] rational pessimism that provides the strongest justification for a conservative politics. - Maurice Cowling

A Marxist or Trotskyite interpretation of history raises the question of hegemony or class power in its simplest form, uses the theoretical possibility of revolution to dramatise class-dominance, and promises insights into the unspoken attitudes of the elites and classes which have exercised power in modern England. This promise is unlikely to be fulfilled, however, when there is no attempt to appreciate either the mixture of motives among the "rich swine" or the fact that in most modern societies some of the "rich swine" were once poor swine, and when there is no grasp of the central truth that hegemony and inequality are necessary for cultural and economic development and for social and political stability and freedom, and are in any case the invariable consequence of revolution once revolution has produced new classes or elites to replace the classes and elites which it was designed to overthrow.

I'm an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections.

The present wind of compassion to some extent blew up, and to some extent was blown up artificially, in the two or three years before the general election and has since been prolonged by Princess Diana's death. It is now being replaced by normal politics which will lead eventually to a resumption of the gnarled, sceptical mistrust of all politicians from which Mr Blair will not be exempt and of which Lord Tebbit is the master. It would be a pity if Conservatives were to mistake a temporary aberration for a permanent obsession and were to addict themselves to a style of thinking derived from a period which is passing.