Good idea, but don't bother telling Major: Can the Tories rediscover the free thinking that helped them seize power, asks Richard Cockett

'I AM worried by this damned election, I have no message for them now.' Could one imagine John Major thinking such thoughts now? Perhaps, as he stares out of his armour-plated Jaguar, on his way from one unenthusiastic Tory Euro-election rally to the next, contemplating his next hiding at the polls. But I doubt it. He is more likely to be thinking about his next cabinet reshuffle or the lack of toilet facilities on that stretch of the motorway.

And therein lies Mr Major's problem: being a populist is all very well, but the Conservative Party is as motivated by ideas as it is by anything else.

It has usually liked to portray itself as a 'pragmatic' party, hard- headed and sensible in its stewardship of the nation's fortunes; anti- intellectual, and waging a perpetual war against the dogmatism of its opponents.

But this has always been an affectation. In truth, Conservative success this century has been founded on a willingness to take intellectual risks and engage in long-term strategic thinking unequalled by any other Western political party, and on an ability to appropriate ideas and policies from an often eclectic variety of sources. Astute leaders such as Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher were able to benefit from the party's intellectualism, yet disguise it in the language of the 'man on the Clapham omnibus'.

Churchill was a past master at this. The words, 'I am worried by this damned election, I have no message for them now,' are actually his. He was speaking to his Boswellising doctor, Lord Moran, in the run-up to the 1945 general election. In spite of the assurances of his entourage that he was destined for a famous victory and that all he had to do to win was turn up, Churchill proved to be more astute than his advisers: the party crashed to its notorious landslide defeat at the hands of the original 'dead sheep', Clement Attlee.

Churchill was one of the most effective Conservative leaders because he knew that, despite the party's reputed disdain for ideas and political theorising, what his troops needed above all was a message or, in the modern vernacular, a 'vision thing'.

Six years later, on re-entering Downing Street after the narrow 1951 election victory, Churchill was asked by John Colville what his new government's aims were. 'Houses, red meat and not getting scuppered,' he replied. Would that all contemporary pledges were as brief and to the point.

Churchill's description of his government's aims were couched in the language of common-sense pragmatism, but his idiomatic choice of words belied one of the most serious and far-reaching policy rethinks that the party had ever undertaken, and which undoubtedly made a large contribution to the 1951 election victory, the first of three for the Tories during the Fifties.

In 1990, when the Tories actually elected the original 'man on the Clapham omnibus' to the leadership, they overlooked the fact that, while he might have spoken the required language, he actually had nothing much to say to them.

One special problem, perhaps, was that the Tories had by then spent more than 10 years in government. Although they like to think of themselves primarily as a party of government, their electoral success has always owed much to the relatively brief periods in opposition. After each election defeat since the war, the party has been prepared to go back to the drawing board to renew itself.

In the late Forties, it was the Conservative Research Department under RA Butler that not only articulated the party's reconciliation with the mixed economy and welfare state of Attlee's governments, but also grafted on the appeal to greater personal economic freedom derived from Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. This was Churchill's 'red meat' (greater personal choice/consumerism) and 'houses' (built by government funding).

Tracing the intellectual origins of Thatcherism is even more instructive. The ideas of economic liberalism, the core of Thatcherism, were developed by economists and academics who had little or nothing to do with Conservative politics.

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which deserves most of the credit for the intellectual conversion to economic liberalism among the political classes, was set up in 1955 as a non-party organisation. Its task, like that of the Fabians, was to 'permeate' all parties with its ideas.

The IEA might have taken its ideological inspiration from Hayek, but it understood equally the truth of Keynes's injunction, at the end of his General Theory, that 'the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval . . . .'

It was almost 20 years before the ideas of the IEA's own academic scribblers were accepted into the political mainstream. It was only during its period of opposition, from 1974 to 1979, that the Conservative Party - at the behest almost solely of one man, Sir Keith (now Lord) Joseph - seriously picked up its thinking. Sir Keith then founded the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in 1974 to articulate the IEA's thinking in political terms for the party.

An idea such as monetarism was thus elevated from being a highly technical and rather obscure economic formulation into a specifically 'political' programme.

The CPS, under the guidance of the maverick Alfred Sherman, was enjoined to 'think the unthinkable' and challenge all the accepted conventions.

It was out of the ensuing melee that 'Thatcherism' emerged to give the Conservatives another ideological lease of life and another 15 years (so far) in office.

But think-tanks are only as good as their clients. Sir Keith had the intellectual curiosity and courage to admit mistakes, which alone can stimulate new thinking and out of which new policies will evolve. His mea culpa on behalf of the party after its 1974 defeat was immensely beneficial in the long run, although it may have seemed politically suicidal in the short term.

But the Conservative Party has never succeeded in institutionalising within the party its capacity for intellectual self-examination. Most of Thatcherism's ideas were developed by policy groups (or 'think-tanks') outside the formal party structure.

The party is good at appropriating other people's ideas, usually spurred by the stigma of electoral defeat, but once in power, it seems almost incapable of harnessing intellectual dissent and challenges to positive ends. Most of the CPS insiders, for instance, had been banished by 1983 for continuing to exercise their critical faculties once the party was in power. Constructive dissent in opposition becomes disloyalty in government.

In office, the party is all too ready to lapse into the pursuit of politics and pretend that the intellectual battles from which it benefited in the past never happened - a process often known as 'calls for unity'. At present, such calls are drowning out any search for ideas.

So the question remains whether, under Mr Major, the Conservative Party can rediscover the intellectual curiosity that has served it so well in the past.

The author is lecturer in history at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His book 'Thinking the Unthinkable. Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931- 1983' is published by HarperCollins tomorrow, price pounds 25.

Bryan Appleyard is away.

(Photograph omitted)