R.A. Butler Memorial Lecture

"It is a great pleasure for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in honour of one of the greatest Conservative thinkers and politicians of the Twentieth Century.

We can still learn from his achievements, particularly the renewal of Conservatism after a landslide defeat in 1945. But before doing so, I want to just briefly refer to another Conservative thinker also of great distinction.

Last year's RA Butler Memorial Lecture was given by Peter Lilley. His lecture was subsequently discussed in more column inches, or should I say column yards, than any other lecture in this distinguished series. The sheer scale of the subsequent debate on his lecture shows there was an enormous pent-up urge to discuss, sometimes with painful frankness, exactly what lessons we should learn from our landslide defeat. But in the course of the subsequent exchanges, important though they were, many commentators lost any sense of the character and ideas of the man who delivered the lecture. Some even saw it as some sort of betrayal of everything that we Conservatives achieved during our years in office. Nobody who really knows Peter could believe that.

I first came across Peter Lilley's ideas when I was a student at Oxford in the late 70s, and read a book he had co-authored with Samuel Brittan, entitled The Delusion of Incomes Policy. It was one of the first brave critiques of what was still the conventional wisdom. Then when I was Nigel Lawson's Private Secretary, Peter was an informal advisor to Nigel, and one of the earliest advocates of privatisation. When I was a junior and undistinguished member of John Major's government, he was Social Security Secretary, and probably the most successful minister in that Government. Throughout this it was clear that two of Peter's fundamental beliefs were in freedom and the free market on the one hand, and secondly in the nation state and national identity. To imagine that he somehow abandoned those is absurd.

There is, of course, an irony about the reaction to Peter's speech and the fear that it was ideologically wayward, because that was how R A Butler was also seen. There is a crude model of Conservative ideas which goes as follows: For thirty years from our defeat in 1945 until Margaret Thatcher became leader in 1975, the Party was under the control of the wets. Their chief ideologue was Butler. He was the ultimate exponent of an older Tory tradition of pragmatism which was not ideologically strenuous enough. As a result, Britain drifted leftwards, regardless of which party was in power, until Margaret Thatcher finally grabbed the ratchet and broke the post-war consensus."