Just Williams
Sir: Many sins can be laid at the door of the Conservative Research Department whose decline, so marked under its current direc- tor, I failed to prevent during my tenure. But Pace Maurice Cowling (Books, 23 May), Mr Hywel Williams was not one of them.
The Conservative party's organisation was not worthy of so great a political talent, though he did send some of the more pre- possessing pupils he taught at Rugby to work for us. In the early 1990s, he fixed his attention on the minister of state at the Welsh Office whose seat he coveted. John Redwood took him on because he possessed the qualification in which an ambitious Englishman at the Welsh Office was above all interested: fluency in the Welsh language. Having been recruited for the humble task of translating Tory manifestos into Welsh, he stayed on to listen at the keyhole and to embroider what he heard. He simply Ignored the wider party responsibilities that he was supposed to undertake in Wales itself. While John Redwood canvassed sup- P°11, Hywel Williams remained imperiously aloof in the ministerial car. In his book ministers destroy the coun- try, while he formulates a radical new strategy for Wales which, it just so hap- pens, could have saved the rest of the United Kingdom as well. In fact it amounts to no more than the application Of simple Thatcherite principles, but even this existed only in his imagination. John Redwood increased the Welsh Office's budget by 5 per cent in his second year as Welsh secretary. He proudly proclaimed that: 'My priorities in a difficult year will be to support better education and train- ing, and an improved health service.' Incidentally, Hywc1 Williams reveals that during John Redwood's leadership cam- paign in 1995, my erstwhile colleague at the Research Department Robin Harris, draft- ed an article for John Redwood to publish In The Spectator. It was not thought satis- factory and did not appear. Why did his assistant not redraft it? I strongly suspect that Hywel Williams himself can only write perverse, purple prose which distorts every- thing it touches.
Alistair Cooke
68 St George's Square, London SW1
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