Top of the internet favourites of every aspiring Tory researcher is the website Conservativehome.com. Its daily round up of polls, news and internal party debate has made it essential reading for party apparatchiks. Tim Montgomerie, its editor, is an influential advocate of the internet and its potential to transform the conservative movement in Britain. ‘My hope is that the blogosphere is the seedbed of a real conservative renaissance,’ he wrote recently.
A keen observer of the American political scene, Montgomerie is an admirer of the way the Republican right used blogs and other forms of online communication during the 2004 presidential campaign to bypass the mainstream media and mobilise its conservative base. It is a tactic he hoped to emulate with the launch of Conservativehome.com before last year’s general election. The site’s original purpose was to persuade social conservatives to back the Tories at the election. In a familiar echo of George W Bush’s own euphemistic appeal to the Christian right, Montgomerie, a former director of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, hoped to use the site to promote ‘a values-based approach to politics’. It thus pushed greater tax relief, opposition to British membership of the euro, support for ‘the strengthening of marriage’ and pre-emptive action in the war on terror.
Since the site’s launch, Conservativehome.com has been gaining influence across the Tory party. Following last year’s election it spearheaded the successful campaign to prevent Michael Howard’s attempt to change the party’s leadership election rules. During the leadership contest itself it became a clearing-house for internal party debate, with the Conservative chair, Francis Maude, describing it as ‘the only place to find out what’s going on’. The site now boasts over 20,000 comments by users, and regular interviews and articles from leading figures in the Tory party, including Cameron himself. Montgomerie’s compassionate conservative beliefs are also proving influential at the Centre for Social Justice, where he is employed by Iain Duncan Smith as a part-time consultant.
Montgomerie subscribes to what he terms the ‘And theory’ of conservatism. This, he explains, by way of example, might entail ‘a commitment to actively support healthy, traditional marriages and fair pension and inheritance arrangements for gay adults’. (Athough elsewhere he assures us that ‘the Bible teaches that homosexuality is always wrong’.) He likes to distinguish his creed from the Blair/Clinton strategy of political triangulation. ‘Triangulators,’ he explains, ‘avoid the “extremes” of both right and left.’ He is rather more cagey, however, about which ‘extremes’ he would like to see the Conservatives pursuing.
Nonetheless, Montgomerie is unsparing in his criticism of the leftward drift of the Tories under Cameron, and would like to see the party doing more to mobilise its conservative base. ‘George W Bush wasn’t re-elected because he assumed religious conservatives would vote for him,’ he complains. ‘His party machine invested enormous resources in maximising the number of Catholic and evangelical Christians who voted Republican. CCHQ must do the same here to energise our core coalitions.’
To this end, his site has recently launched the Inaugural Conservative Movement Awards, whose mission is to ‘celebrate the work of conservatives outside of the Tory party’. Montgomerie’s ultimate vision echoes the grassroots web-based networks of the American right, where ‘millions of Americans learn about [conservative] ideas on right-wing talk radio and via Mississippi-long email lists held by conservative campaign organisations’.
It is not a vision that will perhaps be shared by the new Tory leader. ‘The internet,’ says Montgomerie, ‘presents the greatest opportunities for Britain’s grassroots conservatives to ensure that all of its eggs aren’t in the Cameron basket.’