Conservatives: Aliens

The Conservative Party cannot win a majority unless it wins around young people by “shouting from the rooftops” about liberal policies like gay marriage, a Tory minister has said.

Nick Boles, an ally of David Cameron, said that the Conservatives will struggle to win a Commons majority because “a significant number of people will not even contemplate voting Conservative”.

Because the Conservative Party image still repels many voters, the party should consider running candidates under a new National Liberal banner, Mr Boles said.

The minister was a strong supporter of Mr Cameron’s attempts to modernise the image of the Conservative Party and reach out to new voters. His comments reflect concern among senior Tories that the modernisation project has stalled in recent years.

Speaking to the Bright Blue Tory think tank, Mr Boles said that young voters will only back the Conservatives if they highlight their socially liberal policies including allowing gay marriage.

“The Conservative Party will only win office on its own when it has established beyond doubt its commitment to the advance of freedom and found the courage to stake its claim as the party that all liberals should vote for," he said.

“This new group of voters represents a fantastic opportunity for our party. But we have no hope of securing their support if we approach them with the same proposition that we use to woo our stalwart supporters.” 

Mr Boles said that the Conservatives should campaign among young voters by emphasising policies like gay marriage, free schools and tax cuts for low earners.

“We should not shy away from those achievements but shout them from the rooftops. They should make us proud,” he said. “Having taken the pain, not to be proud of them is completely pointless.”

Daily Telegraph.

How MPs voted then and now...

PS Alex Massie in The Spectator replies - with links to what various other right-wing types think.

"Nick thinks being a bit wary of gay marriage and opposing immigration is toxic' to voters. That can only mean one thing to me.

"He’s never, actually, met a voter in his life."

Rod Liddle, The Sun. 

His point is most voters "couldn’t give a monkey’s one way or the other".
Sort of.

Ivan Massow: Photo Opportunity

“I think the majority of the party are on board on gay marriage,” he told The Independent at his London home. “But it’s totemic and it’s a fight.”

“I was adviser to the party leader and George Osborne was the speech writer, so I was telling George what to write for William,” he recalled, with a chuckle at the irony. For a brief spell in the 1990s he shared a London flat with Nick Boles, now the planning minister, who is also openly gay, and Michael Gove, now the Education Secretary.
Mr Massow’s political views had always been at odds with his position as a gay rights advocate...
He clashed with traditionalists over the notorious Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which blocked the promotion of homosexuality in state schools, and in 2000 dramatically defected to Labour.
“In order to bring about the change I thought was necessary, I felt I had to leave,” he said. “I paid the price though. I’ve been completely quiet for almost eight years now while I’ve seen all my friends ascend to the front bench … or become Prime Minister.”
His resignation highlighted a crisis of identity within the Tories – one that many felt was reconciled when a young, socially progressive, pro-gay politician called David Cameron became leader. “Everyone at the time accused me of being a contradiction but now those contradictions are mainstay – being gay and a Tory is just taken for granted,” Mr Massow said.
In his view there is only one more “baby step” left for the party – gay marriage. “Bringing the Tory Party over these hurdles is all I’ve ever wanted to do. The reason why, in 1999, William Hague decided to stand me next to Margaret Thatcher at the party conference was to show that the party was moving in this direction. The work started that day.” 

Hilarious "It's all about me" interview with the awful Ivan Massow in the Independent. 
Funny, I always got the impression Nick Boles wrote Massow's scripts.
Anyone who recalls him on Question Time may have thought he was as politically illiterate and incoherent as Will Young.
Mr Massow is threatening a "return to politics", which seems to mainly involve getting profiled loads in the media once again. *
Yowsah!

* Here he is in the Mail - his natural home?

Michael Gove: Friend As Foe

The Observer profiles education secretary, Michael Gove today.
Of course what profiler could resist mentioning that Gove once shacked up with two notorious homosexuals?
"He attacked homophobia long before that became mainstream Tory thinking and flat-shared for a while with [Nicholas] Boles, whom Gove met while playing a priest in a film directed by a mutual friend, an early glimpse of the unexpected cultural hinterland he still cultivates, and the financier Ivan Massow, both openly gay."
And yes, Mr Gove has been very good on the gay stuff - here is an item on Gay Pride and gay rights for Newsnight back in 1993, back when we were still battling Section 28 and an unequal age of consent - policies his party doggedly adhered to.
Here he rails against homophobia in The Times in 2003.
I could have chosen many other examples.
And, since you're wondering, although Michael Gove is not the world's most masculine man, I get the feeling he's not gay (and he is married) and would have come out if he was.
This week Michael Gove's government released a white paper, The Importance Of Teaching.
It has been criticised as "a hotch potch" combining plans to create an elite of independent schools with populist nonsense like bringing in soldiers to teach.
But it did stress the importance of tackling anti-gay bullying.
Michael Gove said;
"Homophobic bullying is on the rise in our schools, and homophobic terms are increasingly used towards gay students and straight students in a way that seeks to undermine the tolerance that we have built up over the past 15 years. We therefore need to work with organisations such as Stonewall and the Anti-Bullying Alliance, and to shine the light on schools such as St George’s Church of England school, which has done a fantastic job in tackling homophobic bullying. This requires work not only by school leaders but by political leaders and all of society to tackle a growing prejudice that is scarring our tolerant society.”
This is a new paradox for progressives; that someone like Mr Gove can be so supportive of lesbians and gay men, and yet otherwise be such a right-wing shitbag.
Truly, we live in strange and mysterious times.

Ivan Massow: My Struggle

We return to The Evening Standard where yesterday Britain's leading gay foxhunter, Ivan Massow, explains; "How The Conservatives Learned To Love Us Gays"
It looks like we have the self-serving self-made millionaire Mr Massow to thank for the Tories desperately trying to detoxify their brand in the last few years.
"Today I will walk into Number 10 for the first ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender garden party thrown by a Conservative government. It marks the end of a 20-year crusade that began for me at age 14 as chairman of my local Young Conservatives in Brighton."
It's clearly been a long and often lonely struggle for Ivan "to try and change the party from within" - Massow appears to have forgotten that he decided to jack in trying to change the Tories from within and joined New Labour in 2000.
By happy coincidence, this was also when Labour were at their most politically bouyant in a generation.
He's a strange one, that Massow - and not just because he's long been that walking, talking incongruity, a gay Tory.
He has penned several attention-seeking articles on the Tories and "the gays".
They got the attention they didn't deserve, because not so long ago having any gay man wibbling on about how he was "proud to be a Tory" seemed as bonkers as hearing a black man explain why he'd joined the BNP.
They were also odd, because if you saw Massow on Question Time, he came across as politically illiterate.
Although only the worst kind of cynic would suggest that those articles had been written not by Ivan Massow, but by Nicholas Boles, long a leading Cameroon, now a gay Tory MP, and once Ivan Massow's flatmate.