The man behind the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’ talks to Kate Maltby about his regrets over Iraq and his warnings for David Cameron .

Every modern democracy has a party that speaks enthusiastically for the public sector. And every democracy needs a party that speaks enthusiastically for the private sector. In Britain that party is the Conservatives. In the United States that party is the Republicans. Conservative modernisers are clearly on the right of that dividing line.

To champion enterprise effectively we have to understand that the terms of debate have changed in the last 30 years. If one talks about the challenges enterprise faced 30 years ago one isn’t going to do a very good job of speaking for enterprise today. And modernisation means taking on board some of the genuine concerns that arise in the 21st century because of enterprise. The environmental problems that we face in the 21st century are very different from those we saw in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, the environmental problem was a series of separate problems: clean water, clean air, preservation of endangered species. It was not a systematic problem about the impact of human activity on the climate. So we have to think differently. Not necessarily endorse a specific remedy but at least be aware that’s where the debate is happening.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, especially in Europe, we were opposing people for whom central planning remained not quite a dead idea. One of the things that has changed compared to the 1980s is parties of the left in the English-speaking world are less unacceptable to business people today than they were 30 years ago. Whereas we on the right are championing free enterprise in an environment where it’s clear that the modern economy concentrates its rewards on people with very specific kind of skills and has dealt harshly with many people, especially boys and men, who lack those skills. The prospects of those millions of boys and men are highly relevant to the party of enterprise’s very traditional concern for strong families as a way to provide people with support without depending on the state.

So modernisation recognises that your principles don’t change but the question to which your principles are the answer keep changing.

KM: When did you personally decide that ‘modernisation’ had to happen? Your 2000 book ‘How We Got Here: The 70s’, seems to preach that the rot set in with modernity in the 70s.

I was driven to it by three forces. My job at the White House was to write about the administration’s economic policy. By the election of 2004, the peak of the Bush economic expansion, it was undeniable that this expansion, although real, was not benefiting the great majority of the American population. The great majority were getting into deeper trouble because they were sustaining their standard of living by taking on increased debt. This had been a problem in the 1980s and 1990s and it became a visibly acute problem in 2005–2006.

American conservatives needed a new approach to economic policy to make sure the benefits of growth were broadly shared the way they had been in the 1950s and 1960s. This isn’t about egalitarianism: if all the benefits are going to a very few people then the great achievement of the postwar democracies stops being true: the creation of free-market societies which are not egalitarian but in which the outcomes are broadly accepted because they’re good for everybody. If that stops being true you have real questions about the stability of the social order.

The second thing that drove me was the experience of my children growing up into teenagers. I always think that one’s children are ambassadors from the future and you should listen to them. So if they ask you a question and you muster all your best arguments and they’re still unconvinced, then if you respect them you have to think: ‘maybe it’s possible that they’re not convinced because my arguments aren’t convincing’. And maybe these aren’t arguments, they’re just prejudices.

Then the last thing is the aftermath of Iraq. It’s difficult for me to talk about ... but it is a subject I think about every day. People often ask of me, “Do you have any regrets?” it would be egomaniacal for me to have regrets because it would imply that I was somebody who was important, which I wasn’t, but I was there and I played my part and it didn’t go very well. And, that’s putting it mildly, and it’s a subject I think about literally every day.

And I believe George W Bush does too. I think George W. does a very good imitation of a man with no inner life. But it’s not true.

I don’t have an abrupt 180 degree turn on it. It is frightening to think what Saddam Hussein would have done with a high oil price. The price of oil was low when Saddam was overthrown: it then proceeded to rise, not because of the Iraq war. The price of oil was driven by Chinese and Indian economic growth. So it was on the cards that the price of oil would rise. And then you have to ask well what would Saddam Hussein be like with $50, $80, even $100 a barrel oil? Extremely dangerous.

But it’s on my mind all the time. Every day.

KM: Many UK Conservatives look to the merger that created the Conservative Party in Canada as a model for reuniting with UKIP. Was this a shift of the moderates to the right, or as Alex Massie has argued, an absorption of the right by the moderates?

I was very close to what happened in Canada with the crack-up of the Conservatives. It is more of a warning to Britain than it is an example. What shattered the unity of the old Conservative Party in 1993 was a neglect of regional interests. The old conservatives had governed, as Canada had historically been governed, as an Ontario-Québec coalition with not a lot of respect for the interests of Western Canada, which has the fastest population of the country. That part of the country would always vote conservative. It saw a relatively few rewards.

The issues that destroyed the Conservative Party were issues of the regional balance. They were not ideological issues as people in Britain would understand. So the breakaway party, Reform, made tremendous gains in the West. It never made much in the way of gains in Ontario.

These were people who were not ideologically different but who maintained an inherited blood feud for more than a decade, allowing the Liberal Party to win majority governments with 37–38% of the vote, three in a row.

And when the merger came it changed both parties. The Steve Harper government is much more sensitive and attuned to Western concerns. He is from Calgary, whereas Brian Mulroney [Prime Minister from 1984 –1993] was from Québec. But it has also governed in ways that look a lot like ways provincial conservative governments in Ontario governed.

KM: How can the Conservative Party make peace with its base?

Here’s the real warning to those who think a UKIP merger has the answer. So long as a conservative party is in power, whether it’s Republicans or British Conservatives, it deals with the realities of government. But when defeated it can be very tempting to lean to your base. It happened to the Republicans after 2008, it happened to the Canadian Conservatives in 1993. When you do that you can produce a tremendous burst of activist support. More people show up to your meetings than ever before, especially against the context of the larger demobilised issue of participation in democratic societies. But this is not, this is not the activity of health, this is the activity of fever. And they push it in ways that make you ever less electable and you mistake the signs of intensifying illness for the signs of gathering health. And that has been the story of the Republican Party since 2008. And that was the story of the Reform Party in the 1990s.

Sure, you can bleed from the right, that’s what destroyed the elder George Bush in 1992. 4/5 of people who turned to Perot had voted for George Bush in 1988. But you can also sink the ship by overcorrecting. The danger the Conservatives now face is they’re so mesmerised by the fear of losing 3–4% of votes to the right that they end up overbalancing and losing 8, 10, 12 points to the left. This is the story of the Republican Party since 2008. The party now thinks impulsively. It has conceded so much power to its most militant believers. I think this will go on for a generation. And I think the Republican Party has now moved farther away from centre ground than Labour was in the early 1980s in Britain.

No political party should win every re-election. But there does seem to be a tendency where parties lose, they recoil upon their base vote. It happened to Labour after 1979, it happened to the Democrats after 1968. It happened to the German Social Democrats after Helmut Schmidt lost power.

The longer I spend around politics the more I realise you can get away with disagreeing with people, provided you’ve convinced them that you have listened to them respectfully enough. A big part of the Conservative approach to UKIP should be sitting down and showing respect. And this is true of all kinds of groups in society. You can say “no” to people. People will accept “no” if it’s a “no” after a hearing, a fair hearing. What they won’t accept is outright dismissal. People who were right about the Euro feel they never got enough credit. That doesn’t mean Europe has to be the key issue now.

One of the great insights of the modernisers back in 2005 and 2006 in the UK was you get these polls that showed people agreed with Conservatives on many of the issues that were most important to the party hard-line. They agreed on immigration, they agreed on Europe, they agreed on crime.

They didn’t like the Conservative label, but even more they didn’t like the Conservative list of priorities. This is what most polls were not picking up. The voter agrees with the party on crime. But the party thinks it’s issue number one and the voter thinks it’s issue number four or five. The voter agrees about Europe. But thinks it’s issue number ten.

Cameron’s great insight was that people need to believe that your priorities are the same as theirs. It’s not enough to have the same answers. You must have the same priorities. And if you have the same priorities you can have different, or even unpopular answers so long as people believe you have the same priorities.

The danger will be that if the Conservatives lose and you turn to the right you will go back to the days where your priorities are not those of the British nation as a whole.

KM: Will the GOP pick a Tea Party candidate?

There’s a saying of Benjamin Franklin: “Experience is a hard master, but fools will have no other.” I can’t tell you how often I had the following conversation in 2011–2012: They’d say, “We lost in 2008 to moderate John McCain. And we won in 2010 with the hard Tea Party message.” And I said, “Could we please pay attention to the turnout in those two years?” It’s true if you have an electorate of 40% of the country heavily filtered to the old, the white and the affluent that message will work [because it’s not a Presidential election]. But you’re not going to have that electorate in 2012. The same electorate that showed up in 2008 to vote for President is going to show up in 2012.

And people would not absorb that fact. They insisted on pretending that what had changed between 2008 and 2010 was not the electorate but the country. Then when the big electorate showed up in 2012, guess what, history repeated itself. The Republicans will probably have a reasonably good year in 2014, not as good as 2010, that’s not possible. But hard-line conservatives could do well in 2014 because it will be a small electorate and they’ll say, “See it works.” And then the big, moderate electorate will show up in 2016 – surprise!

Ideologically committed people do not believe that mere failure, even repeated failure disproves their idea. I call this the ham and eggs theory of politics. If people refuse ham and eggs it’s because they wanted double ham and double eggs.

KM: You’ve called Hispanic Americans ‘natural Democrats’, arguing that they are less socially conservative than the GOP hopes. So, how can the GOP win them?

The first lesson from 2012 is: insult fewer people next time. Recognise that everyone has the right to vote because of their own economic interest, as well as social identity. One of the things that was obnoxious about the Romney campaign in 2012 was that he continually implied there’s something illegitimate about poorer people voting with their pocketbook while it was completely reasonable for richer people to do so. I don’t complain when people who have low levels of education and are probably not going to earn much money in the modern economy vote for what’s good for them. Why shouldn’t they? 

The Republican goal must be to achieve a reasonable portion of a Hispanic vote. The question is not why does a Guatemalan immigrant gardener making $27,000 a year with a grade school education, why does he vote Democrat? The hard question is why does an Indian American who owns twelve motels, why does he vote Democrat? Why does a Japanese-American psychiatrist who’s married to a professional woman, who earns a substantial income and has two kids in college, why does he vote Democrat?

The modernization project is not to persuade people to vote against their economic interests, it’s to remove cultural impediments that prevent people who ought to vote for the party of enterprise and private initiative. There are some groups in society that will oppose the Conservative party. But you don’t have to make them fear and revile you. 

KM: How do we find more ethnic minority and female MPs?

I am a huge believer in very intense affirmative action by political parties. There are some institutions in society where meritocracy as judged by numerical test scores must prevail. If you want to be accepted into the Caltech physics program, they simply take the top physics test scorers in the country. And if they turn out to be all of one certain group or one certain gender so be it. But if we are recruiting a police force to patrol a troubled, a troubled and recently riot torn neighbourhood, having an affinity with the people you’re policing is a bona fide job qualification. It means you’re less likely to face a riot next time. And there’s no test scores proving you’re a good police officer.

Politics is not a subject where your aptitude can be measured on a test score. And what do we call the people we elect? We call them representatives. In the 1950s, in the United States when a president put together a cabinet he made sure that there was representation from North and South, made sure there was representation from employers and labour, made sure there were Catholics, Protestants and a Jew. He made the cabinet representative within the kind of political definition of that time. Of course you do the same thing today. That’s part of the job.

KM: Which cabinet ministers could make it in America?

They just would have to learn to play a different game. A British cabinet minister is a politician first and foremost whereas an American cabinet secretary is an administrator first and foremost. But Michael Gove is a great administrator, George Osborne is a great administrator.

KM: And you swear that your new novel, Patriot, isn’t about you?

Not at all. But bear in mind that the more improbable an anecdote about Washington is, the more historically accurate it is. And the more preposterous any of the dialogue is the more likely it is to be taken verbatim from a transcript somewhere. 

Featured in Bright Blue's forthcoming magazine 'The Progressive Conscience: Spotlight on America' to be launched at 9,30pm this evening.

Kate Maltby is a doctoral student researching the philosophy of Elizabeth I, and was from 2010 – 12 the theatre critic for The Spectator’s Arts Blog. She has also written on politics and culture for The Spectator’s Coffee House, Standpoint, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times and The Huffington Post.

Follow Kate on Twitter: @KateMaltby

A few days before the Eastleigh by-election, I ran into a prominent Tory backbencher. What did he think of Maria Hutchings?, I asked. Was it not awkward that, within a month of David Cameron’s ultra-modern crusade to legislate for gay marriage as Tory initiative, he found himself backing a candidate whose attitude towards individual freedom is such that she not only opposes this extension of marriage rights, but would like to restrict abortion to a stage at which many pregnancies have not even been detected, and thinks that the economic effects of immigration can be summed up as ‘reducing the pot for the rest of us’. Didn’t he accept, at least, Steve Richard’s claim that such ideological chaos proved that Cameron had lost control of the party?

‘Not at all,’ my parliamentary friend replied. ‘With any luck, the voters will think she’s with UKIP. And then we might actually have a chance of winning the d—n thing’.

As we now know, poor Maria had no such luck. And ape UKIP she did – even to the point of leafleting the saturated voters with her name emblazoned against the UKIP colours of purple and yellow, under the dubious banner ‘local UKIP MP backs Maria’. True, she was kept pretty quiet by her minders after her disastrous attempt to explain her (perfectly reasonable) decision to opt for private education. But her message had already got through to the voters of Eastleigh: as many canvassers have reported, Hutchings’ reactionary brand of conservatism was her best-known quality on the doorstep.

Certainly, the spectre of social conservatism was not the only problem with the Conservative campaign in Eastleigh. As Matthew d’Ancona has pointed out, ‘the localisation of political combat is sharper than ever.’ The party of Huhne, Hancock and Lord Rennard may currently come across as a League of Extraordinarily Un-Gentlemanly Gentlemen, but they do know how to run a local campaign for local people. 

It is not just the famous gravel pit in Hamble-Le-Rice. The allegedley Tory-backed development of a golf-course has been just as controversial, allowing local Lib Dems to leaflet with this old image of the remote Tory toff. In a time of mass disillusionment with politicians, councillor Mike Thornton successfully presented himself in Lib Dem leaflets as a grown-up administrator who had honed his skills on local issues. His campaign website still hosts four revolving banners: an attack on the gravel pit; an attack on the golf course development; a call for a new bypass at Botley and a defence of Liberal Democrat tax policy. That’s three local issues, and one national issue of bread and butter economics. They won Thornton the seat.

It will be hard going for the Tories to scrap with Lib Dems on local issues in forty different seats come the 2015 election. To hedge against their national obscurity, Liberal Democrat MPs have long invested in building highly personal, local followings in their core constituencies. And as Rupert Myers reveals in The Spectator, Eastleigh exposed deplorable inefficiencies in the Tory ground game. The accuracy of data was so poor, claims Myers, that ‘we called quite a few dead people’. No doubt that was just the thing to persuade the grieving relatives to vote Tory.

Hope may lie on the horizon. Today’s Sunday Times talks up the market value of METIS, a new database of voter information. But those who have looked closely at the failings of the Romney campaign should be more wary of anyone claiming to sell technology as silver bullet. Romney’s disastrous ORCA database did as much to damage to his electoral prospects as any debate flip-flop. The system required local tellers to input their latest turn-out information, but then wait to hear a data analysis from headquarters in Boston. Experienced local campaigners were left waiting in polling stations, banned from driving to get in the vote until they had been given Boston’s instructions. And they waited. And they waited. Because, on election day, and election day only, the entire ORCA system crashed.

The lesson of ORCA is not that technology always fails, but that it is no substitute for local knowledge. The Tories have plenty of work to do if they are to develop a local network to challenge Lib Dem or even soft-Left majorities in 2015. But challenge on the centre they must. Because much as the Tory backbench may try, it is simply impossible to outflank UKIP on the reactionary Right. Can they really out-crazy a party who bring the Hamiltons to canvass? Maybe CCHQ can encourage a defection from MEP Godfrey Bloom, whose primary quarrel with modernity is that women have forgotten how to clean a fridge, although he’s also eager to explain that ‘no businessman with a brain’ should employ those with functioning wombs. Of course, to really match UKIP, Tory HQ would have to bring in the party leader to back up ‘dear old Godders’.

Maria Hutchings may have looked like UKIP, swum like UKIP and quacked like UKIP, but short of actually sticking a UKIP rosette on her jacket, she still could not pick up the core UKIP vote. Meanwhile, the Tory rosette she did wear wiped out any chance of picking up the mid-term protest vote, which if posters like this are anything to go by, formed the core of UKIP’s swing. More seriously, her reactionary views lost her any chance of undercutting the Liberal Democrat vote – and the Liberal Democrats, in case you had forgotten in all the UKIP madness, actually won the seat.

Fortunately, the Tory Party, unlike UKIP, is only mad North-North West. If it sticks with a modernizing wind, it might yet be able to tell a hawk from a handsaw.

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