The Conservative Party mustn't sound like the old man on the park bench who says things were better in 1985, or 1955, or 1855.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We'll need to revise the tired assumption that people automatically become more conservative as they grow older.
One of the things that goes with getting older is that one becomes more conservative - and I emphasise that when I use the word conservative I do not mean politically.
The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.
Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.
The whole of the situation of the Conservative Party today springs from that night when they dismissed the best prime minister the country had had since Churchill.
People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.
People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
The fact is that not only do people get more wise and more conservative as they get older, they get more kind and more generous, too.
Nobody is more conservative in the Congress and the House than Phil Gingrey.
The conservative movement was told to curl up in a fetal position and just stay there for the next eight years, thank you very much. Well, how things have changed.