Into the Lion’s Den

Wednesday 21 March 2007

One of the pleasures about being a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, as well as a putative politician, is that I have an excuse to go anywhere and everywhere, and mix with people both high and low — even Conservatives. So I was delighted to accept an invitation to attend a dinner this evening at the Coningsby Club (in a function room at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall), where the speaker was the ‘quiet man’, Iain Duncan Smith. The Coningsby was founded in 1921, to keep Oxford and Cambridge university graduates involved in politics and is one of the liveliest forums for discussion among Conservatives. Having been mightily unimpressed by IDS when he came to address a lunchtime briefing of the Association of European Journalists four years ago, when he was Tory party leader, I sat down this evening with some trepidation. But his fall from office seems to have had a cathartic effect (just as it did with Edward Heath, I found). He’s now heavily involved with the Centre for Social Justice, looking at issues of social exclusion, drug and alcohol addiction, family breakdown etc, and will be proposing various related measures to Cameron and Co in June or July. In our adversarial system of politics in the UK, we tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything another party says, immediately trying to demolish it, though in both local government and in the Scottish parliament, LibDem politicians are beginning to understand that there is  lot to be gained in studying objectively what the others are saying, and when appropriate cooperating where there is common ground. That’s how things are done in most continental countries, of course, and it is doubtless how things will evolve here once we move to proportional representation.

In the meantime, however, we can be civil opponents to both the Conservatives and Labour (not to mention the Greens!) in electoral contests. And I suspect that the next time I run into IDS, it will not be over a meal, but hitting the streets in the current Chingford Green by-election campaign in Waltham Forest, where former LibDem group leader Graham Woolnough has been coaxed out of retirement to take on the Tories in what they like to think of as the truest blue of true blue territory, but certainly can’t take for granted.

Link: www.chingfordandwglibdems.blogspot.com