What needs to be explained is not particularly why Roman Catholics go to church, but why Protestants don't. Somehow the gut seems to have gone out of… - Maurice Cowling

[W]hat Mrs Thatcher seems to have sensed—is that that part of the liberal intelligentsia which grew up in the shadow of Hitler, Spain and Unemployment is deeply alienated from the Labour party. It has never liked trades unions even though, in the form of the 'ragged-trouser generation' (as Mr Stuart Hampshire calls it), it was willing, when young, to profess sympathy for the working classes whom it idolized in ignorance and at a distance and, quite wrongly, regarded as its natural ally in the fight against illiberal, reactionary, capitalistic Conservatism.

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.

[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 since May 1997, which are capable of welding middle-class and working-class sentiment together, and which need to be moved out from being Lord Tebbit's speciality into being what, rather vaguely, they are already: the rhetoric with which Mr Redwood, Miss Widdecombe and Mr Hague will expose the higher humbug which emanates from Downing Street.