Lay off the Tory tabloids
From Nigel Jones
Sir: Douglas Hurd advises us to ignore the campaigns of the popular press — and, by implication, the people whose concerns they ably articulate (‘Time to fight back’, 26 February). Hurd has spent his professional patrician lifetime disdaining the opinions of ordinary people. That is why the party he and his fellow grandees — Heseltine, Howe and Patten — drove into the ground by 1997 is in such a parlous condition today. It is the press that has provided the only opposition to Hurd’s neo-Blairite agenda, and has vigorously rejected the policies so dear to him: coddling criminals, bending the knee to Brussels and grovelling to foreign despots everywhere. Yet, at a time when all right-thinking people (in both senses of the term) should be uniting to rid us of the most disastrous, dictatorial and dishonest government of modern times, Hurd’s considered counsel is to reject the Conservative press.
The Tory party will never regain popularity and power until it reconnects with the real worries of the British people, so powerfully articulated by the Tory tabloids Hurd loathes. He has clearly never forgiven Margaret Thatcher for grasping this truth.
Nigel Jones Lewes, East Sussex
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