"Competition on the Right is a good thing. But thus far, the Tories have allowed Farage all the running"
Telegraph: 2nd January 2025: :Lord (David Frost) lays out the obstacles and opportunities facing those of a conservative persuasion
"Few of us, it seems, have welcomed 2025 with much enthusiasm. It’s not surprising. We already know that this awful Labour government is taking us further towards a collectivist, ultimately socialist society... This fundamentally conservative country can already see and feel it all... So Labour must be opposed...
...this requires a political movement ready to be honest with the British people about how bad things have got and what will be needed to turn the country around. For we, along with most of Europe, have been going in the wrong direction for a long time now...
Who on the Right is going to be honest about this?... ...Who will step up?...
...So far it has to be said that Reform has an early lead... From the Conservatives and Kemi Badenoch, so far, we haven’t had the articulation of any clear principles, and over Christmas only a silly and, it turns out, ill-founded attack on Reform over their membership numbers. Farage tells us in his New Year’s message that we are a country in “societal decline and economic decline”. Kemi Badenoch asks us to “watch this space”.
Of course, it is fair enough to resist setting out a long list of detailed policies. But the principles the Conservatives are operating upon do need to be clear...
...For the past three years, I have spent every other weekend talking to Conservative activists and potential voters. But I can’t do so at the moment because I just don’t know what to say. Do we support or oppose net zero? Do we back near-zero net migration? What do we think about the European Convention on Human Rights? Do we oppose the Brexit “reset”?...Do we plan to cut spending and taxes, and if so where?...
...And, crucially, can we credibly disavow much of what recent Conservative governments have done, and say, as Sir Keith Joseph famously did in 1975, “I had thought that I was a Conservative, but now I see that I was not really one at all"...."