Michael Gove

He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum. A sense of the past is a precious thing. And not to know history, as Cicero argued, is to remain a child for ever. Orwell, as a student and satirist of the Soviet system, would have appreciated the special value of knowing what passed for progress in the communist world. And a knowledge of Soviet history is particularly precious when it comes to examining what’s happening in our education system at present. One of the grim everyday realities of life before the Berlin Wall came down was the grossly unjust way in which two parallel economies operated within one political system.

There are few feuds as destructive as the squabble over a legacy. In Bleak House, the case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce provides Charles Dickens with one of fiction’s most debilitating contests — a battle over an inheritance which blights all those involved. But Westminster is still, nevertheless, absorbed by the struggle to lay claim to a legacy. The inheritance which is the object of so much attention is the right to be recognised as the ‘heir to Blair’. When the former prime minister left office the general consensus among commentators was that he had overstayed his welcome. Those of us writing in 2003 that he was, at last, proving himself a proper reformer were a small band.

Watching Labour’s 2005 election campaign unfold, I’m afraid words fail me. The great Democrat governor of New York Mario Cuomo once remarked that ‘we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose’. And even though I struggle to find the language to do justice to Labour’s campaign, one poet does capture their approach perfectly: Rudyard Kipling. Seeing Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Alan Milburn on the offensive irresistibly brings back some lines from ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’. ‘The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,/ And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

In all its long history, the parliamentary Tory party has never been so depressed. If a doctor were to observe its current behaviour, he would put the patient on suicide watch. When I spoke to Conservative MPs this week it was hard to find any spark of optimism, breath of hope or relish for the fight. Whether they are former ministers from the glory days of the Eighties or coming men who entered Parliament while the Tories have been in opposition, a universal darkness covers all. They feel saddled with a leader whom few imagine capable of winning an election, but most fear to remove.

A melancholy anniversary recently passed virtually unnoticed: it is now more than a decade since the Conservative party fell behind in the polls. Never has a major opposition party been so unpopular, with so many, for so long. If Conservatives are ever to govern again, they must do three things. They have honestly to appreciate why their party has come to this pass. They must eschew false comforts and snake-oil remedies, which will only prolong their agony. And, above all, Tories must transform the way they operate. Unless the culture of the party changes, it will never reconnect with a country that it now treats as a foreign land. The scale of the Tory malaise is unprecedented. There have been more than 500 published polls in the past ten years.

Why didn't the Tories invite Pete Waterman to speak at their conference? The guru behind Kylie Minogue who has become a familiar television face as a judge on ITV's Pop Idol certainly wouldn't have felt out of place. He's used to helping nervous unknowns who want to make it big. And his experience sitting beside the bracingly honest Simon Cowell on the Pop Idol judging panel would have meant that he would instantly have seen the wisdom in Theresa May's uncompromising insistence that the Tories get their act together. Only when you fully realise how badly you're performing will you make the effort required to get it right. The important lesson Waterman could have told the Tories was one he shared with Times readers on Monday.