The Conservatives 2

BE COOLER, GAYER, AND LESS WHITE

Simon Brocklebank-Fowler (aged 36), who is

on the Tory candidates' list, says how the party can win back the young — or die

THE MATRONLY furore attendant on William Hague's plans to share his hotel suite at Blackpool with his fiancée shows how detached from the real world parts of the Tory party have become. It also shows how high is the mountain that Hague must climb to drag his party membership through the Sixties cultural revolution, something no previous Conservative leader has been badly beaten enough to need to try.

Yet modernisation of the very outlook of his party is not ancillary, but central, to the ability of the new Conservative leader to win office. In supporting his proposals for party reform, the activists next week will have a singular opportunity to leave a rather literal political legacy.

It may be the Victorian liberal compo- nent of its history which makes the Tory party so forgiving of money and so intoler- ant of sex. Few could argue that the party has caved in prematurely to the nostrums of the prophylactic age. It takes nerve for a party which will not sack Neil Hamilton to gripe at a single man who shares a room with a girlfriend, something no modern hostess would do if she wished to entertain any house guests who weren't old-age pen- sioners.

Whatever its origins may have been, this sorry state is not the fault of the new lead- er. The party he has inherited has actually prided itself until recently on proffering an old duffer vision of the future.

Hague's troubles do not end, however, with the well-intentioned efforts of a less streetwise leader. For Labour has rediscov- ered itself as a party which fashionable people want to join, a status it has not enjoyed since the death of Gaitskell. Even outside Islington, New Britons, trained by hours of the world's best television adver- tising, look at the Blairs and see a couple they want to be: attractive, young, chilled out, with kids dressed to the eyeballs in Polo Sport at 80 quid a pop. The lads have even got into a decent school.

By contrast, Conservatives, seen through the prism of their constituency associa- tions, seem to be the last people in the country who are wearing sensible shoes. Worse, Tories do not seem to like any of the people who make the nation's cultural weather: gays, ethnic minorities and young women. For those who seek confirmation of this view, the Tory parliamentary party represents the distilled preferences of 164 Conservative Associations over the last three decades: there is not a single non- white or openly gay Tory MP, and only one woman under 40. The Tory parlia- mentary benches resemble nothing so much as the set dressing for a stage revival of Edward and Mrs Simpson.

There has been a predictably disastrous cost in terms of the party's support among its non-traditional support base, the very groups which shape the nation's under- standing of itself and who felt most bereft by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Women may run the party, but they are not voting for it save as pensioners.

You don't need to have worked at McICinsey's to see that the bare prerequi- site of Conservative electoral victory is the reinvention of the party as a force which accepts what Britain has become. The pre- sentational initiatives which have charac- terised the first 100 days of the Hague leadership should therefore not be seen as the hapless meanderings of spin doctors. The shot of Mr Hague with brainy, sassy bombshell Ffion in black, gay Notting Hill sends as clear a signal about what is all right in the 1997 Tory party as did the wearing of the Star of David by the Danish royal family to show what they felt was all right in 1940 Denmark.

Hague knows that the 'cooling' of Britain has changed the political map as surely as did the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He has no wish to see in the millenni- um as an iconic equivalent of Michael Foot. And, if his party backs him next week, he will prove a potent emblem of what the Tory party has made possible in Britain for people of all backgrounds. He brings much of his predecessor's direct experience of ordinary people, and a pro- fessional and academic strength which stands in sharp relief to Tony Blair's lack of form outside the Neanderthal and uncom- petitive conditions of the Labour party of the 1980s. As someone who was a student contemporary of Hague in the early 1980s, I remember hearing, from across the fens at Cambridge, of him pulling off the tough- est of Oxbridge doubles: a First and the Union presidency. It hadn't been done on the Cam since Douglas Hurd in the 1950s.

Hague was even the best looker in the Conservative leadership race. This may be an unnerving reminder that stocks are low of Tory matinee idols younger than Lord Parkinson, but it was a good enough reason for him to get the job in the age of televi- sion, even without his other merits.

Not since 1945 has the Conservative party found itself so out of tune with the zeitgeist as it is today. The party responded then by transforming its candidate selection procedures and organisation, and by recruiting a million new members — more than five times the current total party membership. In the Young Conservatives, it promoted the most successful mass polit- ical youth movement in the free world. It still took two general elections to win a parliamentary majority.

If, therefore, Hague fails to deliver elec- toral victory in 2001, it is unlikely to be through excess of youthful exuberance. And it will certainly not be because he shared his bed in Blackpool with a striking young woman to whom he will then have been happily married for many years.

Simon Brocklebank-Fowler fought Stockton North for the Tories in the 1992 election. He is co-author, with James Bethell, Andrew Honnor and Andrew Reid, of Blue Skies Ahead, to be published next week by the Centre for Policy Studies, 57 Tufton Street, London SW1; tel: 0171 222 4488.