Jayne Dowle: Lifelong Tories look at Cameron and despair

AT 92, and a lifelong Conservative, my mother-in-law has seen it all; she served in the war effort, was a working mother before they were invented, and is living proof that education and hard work can get a person a very long way indeed. She is anything but a “swivel-eyed loon”, and although I might not always agree with her politically, I am compelled to jump to her defence and to that of the many others like her offended by the insult reportedly meted out by a close aide of the Prime Minister.
Margaret ThatcherMargaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher

I first got to know Marjorie in the John Major years, when she was still disgusted at what had happened to her heroine, Margaret Thatcher. To women like my mother-in-law, our first female Prime Minister was a total role model; when we met, she even dressed like her and had similar hair. I trod carefully those first few years, careful not to offend. There we were, the stroppy Northerner from a mining town and the lady from suburban Surrey, but it didn’t take me long to develop a deep respect for her right-wing stance, forged as it was by first-hand experience not only of social mobility but of taking responsibility for herself.

Marjorie grew up in rural Bedfordshire, a bright daughter in a family of farm labourers, and did well at school. In a different time, she may have gone to university, but the Second World War loomed and she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, ending up as a Sergeant Major. After the war, she moved around the country and worked as a secretary, not marrying until her late 30s, to Ernest, who ran a building firm. Two children in her early forties were followed by widowhood before she was 50, so she went back to work and brought up a son and daughter to abide by the values which had shaped her own life; respect for family and education, good manners and frugal habits.

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Despite voting Tory all her life, she has never been a member of the party, but this doesn’t lessen the impact of that insult. You might argue that anyone who joins a political organisation has to be prepared to stand up and defend themselves. However, Marjorie is just an ordinary supporter who gets all her news and views from the television, radio and papers; she has no way of fighting back, except with her vote.

And for all those decades, and all those leaders from Churchill to Cameron, she thought she was voting for a political party which supported the way she has chosen to live her life. What she sees these days though is a party led by a metropolitan elite who have little understanding of her life.

No matter how many times the Prime Minister insists, as he did in a BBC radio interview yesterday, that he is “one of them”, or tries to persuade her that he is tough on welfare cheats, immigration and educational standards, she feels acutely the disconnect that he denies even exists.

What she also feels frustration with is a leadership increasingly obsessed with matters which don’t actually concern her too much. She is a compassionate person but I doubt the issue of gay marriage even crossed her mind before it was inflicted upon her conscience. And as for Europe, well, when you’ve lived through the Second World War and its aftermath you tend to take the long-term view on that kind of thing.

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To be honest, she doesn’t ask for much, only security for herself and her children and grandchildren, and access to decent healthcare should she need it. She doesn’t want a party in thrall to the modernisers and the reformers. She just wants a steady hand on the tiller, not a leader who feels compelled to email his party activists to beg forgiveness.

That disconnect she feels is growing, because although we have a government led by a Conservative, the naturally conservative people Cameron purports to represent are being let 
down and cast adrift. Their values – hard work, thrift, quiet pleasures and 
a deep and abiding love of their country – seem to have been trampled over 
and disregarded in the scramble for power.

When these people look at those who lead the party, they don’t, as my mother-in-law did with Margaret Thatcher, see an idealised version of themselves. They don’t see a decent chap attempting to do a good job in impossible circumstances, as they did with John Major or William Hague.

What they see is a bunch of rude and brattish children who care nothing
for shared values and only for themselves.

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David Cameron argues that he is committed to “being on the side of people who work hard and want to do the right thing”. If he wants to do the right thing himself, he will listen less to those who sit sneering around his dinner table and more to people like Marjorie who sit in the suburbs, watching the news and shaking their heads in quiet despair.