Tories deride Blair's gurus

Tony Blair, his new Labour Party, and the gurus who guide him, are rootless people seeking to purge the essential Britishness of Britain, according to an "intellectual" onslaught delivered by the Tories today, writes Anthony Bevins.

David Willetts, a junior government minister, widens the attack on Mr Blair - from his wife, Cherie, and the cardigan he wore when he recently revised the "New Life" manifesto, to the men who provide his intellectual ballast.

Following the embarrassment of last week's "spoof" Labour manifesto, launched as a joke by the party chairman Brian Mawhinney and Michael Heseltine, the deputy Prime Minister, Conservative Central Office yesterday flagged up a pamphlet by Mr Willetts, Blair's Gurus, as the intellectual answer to New Labour.

"The dilemma which these Blairites face," Mr Willetts argues, "is that they are seeking to make Britain something else. What they do not like about us is precisely what makes us British ..."

Regarded as a brainy young lion, because, in the words of one Commons colleague "he reads books", Mr Willetts dissects the way in which Mr Blair, acting magpie-like, has picked up the ideas of people who have begun to question the record of Thatcherism.

"1995 was a bad year for Conservatives fighting the battle of ideas," he says. "A series of books by John Gray (Enlightenment's Wake), Will Hutton (The State We're In), Frank Field (Making Welfare Work), Simon Jenkins (Accountable to None: the Tory Nationalisation of Britain), and Andrew Marr (Ruling Britannia: the Failure and Future of British Democracy) added up to the most weighty attack since 1979 on the principles and practice of Conservatism."

But he proceeds to dissect and dismiss their contribution to Mr Blair's thought and rhetoric. Terms like community, globalisation, insecurity, short-termism, stakeholders, centralisation, constitutional reform, Americanisation, and social inclusion are buzz words of Labour's political economy. "If you deleted those expressions from a Blair speech, little would be left."

5 Blair's Gurus by David Willetts MP: Centre for Policy Studies, 52 Rochester Row London SW1P 1JU. pounds 7.50 (excluding p&p).