We're Not Tories, Say The Tories

[MrsTrellisfromNorthWales]

This is NOT an April Fool.

And it shows that Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition are concentrating their efforts on the big issues.

 

 

Ditching four centuries of political tradition is never easy, but that has not stopped the Conservative party from trying to persuade broadcasters to stop calling them Tories during the forthcoming general election campaign.

The party's head of broadcasting, Michael Salter, has written to television channels urging them to refrain from using the label in their election coverage, at least in their first reference to the party.

 

"Just a quick thought," he wrote, "in the run-up to the general election is there any way people could call us Conservatives rather than Tories?

 

"It will be Conservative candidates people are voting for and they will be Conservative policies rather than Tory."

Mr Salter's plea is the latest in a series of attempts by the party to shed its unpopular Thatcherite image and rebrand itself as a centrist political force representative of modern Britain.

 

Much effort has gone into airbrushing Michael Howard's image, with advisers persuading him to appear with his extended family at the party's spring conference, in the style of a US political convention.

 

The Tories' latest identity crisis comes as opinion polls continue to show policies to be less popular among voters when they are linked with the party, eight years after they left office.

 

Though the label Tory has been used for years as a term of abuse by the left, it has never been deemed pejorative by the Tories themselves. Indeed, Conservatives have for centuries been proud to call themselves Tories.

 

For much of the 20th century the term was associated with the paternal left of the party - before Mrs Thatcher banished that, and the post-war consensus, to the history books. Indeed, Harold Macmillan once claimed that "Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism".

 

The term was born in the late 17th century to describe those parliamentarians who opposed the exclusion of James, Duke of York from the royal succession. It derived from the Irish word for outlaw, toraidhe.

 

The Tories began to be referred to as Conservatives in the early 19th century, when Robert Peel, who outlined their philosophy in the Tamworth manifesto, managed to rally the demoralised party and return it to power after years of Whig rule

[Dave the Cardboard Box]

Mrs Trellis - you have your finger on the pulse of the average Welsh fishwife -

 

I get the impression that NOBODY over there is happy to vote for Mr. Blair

 

And that consequently the Labour vote is in meltdown.

 

What's the skeet from the back streets of LLLLLoandfgrogdghwwellog?

[MrsTrellisfromNorthWales]

I can assure you I am not a fishwife. Mr Trellis is certainly not a fish.

 

What a strange world you must live in, Mr Box, to imagine that I would marry into a piscine family.

 

It's NORTH Wales, where it's ovine all the way.

 

We're radical Plaid, we are. We dream of one day uniting with our brothers and sisters from Patagonia in a kind of anschluss, but a good one.