New society

During the course of an interview with Woman's Own, published on 31 October 1987, Margaret Thatcher remarked that "there is no such thing as society". The argument about what precisely she meant to say has waged, on and off, ever since. Her own explanation, that "society for me was not an excuse, it was a source of obligation," has not been universally accepted.

But whatever the original intent, this famous soundbite has long since come to epitomise the view that Conservatives believed in a sort of extreme version of Smilesian self help – or that they were plain selfish, the "nasty party". It did not do them any electoral favours, and now David Willetts, once one of Mrs Thatcher's hired thinkers, has decided to do something about it. "We are rediscovering society," he tells us. This is very welcome; now the Tories have to show that they have the policies to back that up. That will be the tricky bit.