[T]he most important feelings for Conservatives to be expressing at the moment...are the cynical feelings of disbelief which have been held at bay si… - Maurice Cowling

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.

Moral tolerance has not been a dominant feature of Conservative thinking in the past and, however desirable, is unlikely to become one of its dominant features, or indeed a dominant feature of the thinking of Labour voters so long as the gay and lesbian lobbies remain rancid and militant. Aspiration and choice, on the other hand, are qualities which every Conservative leader since Baldwin has applauded without embarrassment or affectation and the Conservative instinct for "social cohesion" has been as central as the search for a new prosperity and "new opportunities for millions of people" in the last 18 years.

I mean the permissive, metropolitan liberalism which uses the language of protest, progress and the open mind but which has by now become orthodox, predictable and is in many cases the mindless slogan of empty minds. Above all I mean the liberalism which over the last twenty years has encountered virtually no opposition and for which the events of the last six weeks have come as a particularly nasty revelation of the state of public thinking.