ON the whole, the recent election results from Britain make glum reading for conservatives, those with and those without a capital “C.” Of a 60 percent turnout, the victorious Labour party got 36 percent, the Conservatives 33 percent, the Liberal Democrats 22.5 percent, and “other” (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish parties) 9.5 percent. Since the LibDems are well to the left of Labour (“Naderite” would be a fair U.S. equivalent) and most of the little nationalist parties are well to the left of them, you could sum up the British electorate of 2005 as being 20 percent in favor of the Tories’ diluted post-Thatcherite conservatism, 40 percent to the left of that, and 40 percent indifferent.
For me, this was the occasion of melancholy reflections on the political passions of the early 1980s, the last point at which I was active in British politics. As a foot soldier in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party, my duty was to tramp the streets of Holborn and St. Pancras (the district of north-central London I was living in), ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets to spread the good news of national redemption through conservatism. Secondary activities included attending meetings of the local party faithful, and taking occasional trips to Parliament with other activists to be briefed by government ministers of the junior sort. Of the constituency meetings I recall only an angry man who stood up at every one of them to deliver a bitter harangue about the need for a bill to ban incitement of class hatred. Of the
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