Posted on 10/09/2004 11:24:35 AM PDT by quidnunc
Bournemouth This seaside resort town has seen better days. So has the Tory party, which last week convened here for its annual conference. The town was devastated when cheap airfares made the sun and beaches of Spain affordable for vacationing Brits. The Tories were devastated when they first deposed their electoral meal ticket, Margaret Thatcher, and then descended into intraparty feuding over the role of Britain in Europe, treated themselves to a round of sex and finance scandals that made a mockery of their "Back to Basics" theme, and ruined their reputation for economic management by joining a European currency system that subjected voters to double-digit inflation and interest rates.
But Bournemouth is on the upswing. One out of four workers is now employed in the business and financial services sector, with J.P. Morgan Chase alone providing over 4,000 good jobs. House prices are rising, and the pensioners who dominated the landscape are being replaced by a younger, night-life-loving generation.
The Tories, too, seem to be on a bit of a roll. Although they have just taken a beating in a local by-election, coming in fourth in a Labour stronghold behind Tony Blair's candidate, the antiwar and very green Liberal Democrats, and a fringe party that wants Britain to quit the European Union, the smell of dissension and defeat that characterized last year's conference was absent. In its place was a perhaps overly optimistic appraisal by the party's able co-chairman, Maurice Saatchi (he of advertising agency fame). Lord Saatchi, as he now is known in recognition of his creation of the advertising campaign that helped propel Margaret Thatcher into No. 10 Downing Street, thinks the party has a chance not only to whittle down Labour's huge parliamentary majority, but to replace it with a Tory government.
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(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
And the same was said of Ian Duncan Smith and William Hague(the best leader the Tories have had in a long time) before that.
What little I've heard out of the UK Tories, they (or their leadership anyway) sound more like bunch of opportunistic cretins than a beacon of conservatism.
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