Marching to the right

Hague misses the mood of the country

He attacked the Guardian, but that's par for the course among party leaders these days. He also made some good gags, offered a stirring peroration and showed once again why he is the most technically accomplished public speaker in British politics. But William Hague had to do more than regain his debating champion's title yesterday. He had to bind the Conservative party together and sell it once more to a British electorate which has remained stubbornly unimpressed by both him and them. Judged on the first count, Mr Hague can count yesterday as a success; judged on the second, he has a long way further to go.

There is no doubt that the activists gathered inside the Winter Gardens came away basking in a sense of unity they have not enjoyed in years. Having expelled Messrs Clarke and Heseltine to outer darkness, Mr Hague's party enjoyed the consistency of a political force purified by a purge. They could rail against Europe safe in the knowledge that Mr Clarke could only voice his objections in a soundproofed BBC commentary box, where the country could hear him but the party could not. Mr Hague used that freedom to make a speech that pressed all the buttons of the faithful - denouncing smelly, unhygienic foreign food and the Napoleonic ambitions of the Brussels super-state. Conservatives lapped it up, turning to each other to note that the party had a strong man at the helm once more.

But that was not his sole task yesterday. William Hague had to speak to those outside the hall, too - to the four million former Conservative voters who abandoned the party in 1997, and particularly to those who crossed party lines and backed Tony Blair. Did yesterday's speech reach those people? Some of it will have. The leader's plain-speaking manner will appeal to some former Tories, as will his slogan - designed to fit his personality - of "common sense" solutions to everyday problems. Plenty of afternoon TV viewers will have nodded at his plea for policemen to get out from behind their desks and back onto the beat, for the state to pay for a private operation if the NHS can't do it in time, for schools to be able to run their own affairs away from the meddlings of local bureaucrats. No matter if there would be real problems in turning these ideas into reality, they do, as the man says, sound like good common sense. Mr Hague's frequent appeals to pride in an independent Britain will have struck ears as strident and jingoistic, but Tory strategists are convinced that the success of their anti-euro message in June proved such talk wins votes.

Still, these are specifics. The broad thrust of the speech is what matters and here the Conservatives made a strategic error. Instead of heading for the centre ground, where elections are won, the party this week marched to the right. Not only was there almost no mention of the economy in yesterday's address - as if ceding the ground of managerial competence to Labour - there was no hint of the kind of "compassionate conservatism" now proving so fruitful for George W Bush in the US. Mr Hague promised a kinder, gentler Tory party in his first leader's speech two years ago, but provided no sense of that yesterday. The Conservatives now seem to believe that they lost in 1997 because they were not rightwing enough. This recalls the Labourites of 1981 who believed they had not been sufficiently leftwing in 1979 - and look what happened to them. Their mistake was to misjudge the mood of the country, not to realise how much it had changed. On yesterday's evidence, Mr Hague is repeating that error.