Minty, did you read the Waldegrave article? I thought it was good until he spolit it by adding at the end that's what Cameron and his Big Society was all about! If you ignore that bit, it was difficult to find much to disagree with.

No. I don't have access to the Times website, and I haven't had the chance to go and find a copy anywhere else in the building yet.

I would agree that there has been a definite change in the Conservative Party – but that change is not new: in essence, it happened before the 1979 election, and William Waldegrave was part of the governments that put those changes in place, so it would be more than a tad disingenuous if he were to be claiming now that the changes were rather more recent.

We have merely been following the same basic path since.