9 OCTOBER 2004, Page 36

From Graham Baker Sir: Peter Hitchens's penetrating and resounding analysis

of the Tory party's current dismal state ('The problem, not the solution', 2 October) is further evidence that it is now among the disaffected Right that the really profound philosophical and political thinking is taking place, albeit provoked by the urgent desperation of necessity. The Left has atrophied into the ideological mindset of the 1960s.

Whether a party which reflects true conservative principles will develop from the one so patently disorientated and demoralised remains to be seen, but as an intellectual compass setting it would be hard to better Disraeli — 'In a progressive country, change is constant; and the great question is, not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, hut whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.'

Graham Baker

Eye, Suffolk