Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

A year ago I had a great deal more time for David Cameron than I do now. While I am not instinctively a Conservative, I am realistic enough to understand that the party most likely to promote and apply policies I am prepared to support, while remaining at all electable, is the Conservative Party (the Liberal Democrats having, with a few uninfluential exceptions, almost entirely abandoned all political philosophy remotely related to their name), more specifically the Thatcherite wing of same. (Although Mrs. Thatcher was a Hayekian liberal economically, she remained morally authoritarian; but as Hayek himself makes clear, it is economic freedom that is the prerequisite to all other types of freedom, on the basis of which I consider it more important to support a party of economic freedom and questionable moral authoritarianism than to support a socially liberal but economically ignorant party.) There are, of course, many schools of thought within the Conservative Party, of which only few are instinctively liberal in outlook: the Tory tradition of paternalism is esentially statist in character, for example.

Unfortunately David Cameron has demonstrated not only a worrying degree of naïve faith in the benign power of the state in the economic arena, but also he has from the very beginning shown himself to have a healthy self-righteous moral authoritarian streak, not least in his dreary and transparently psephologically-motivated homilies about the environment. Not one to shy away from a cause du jour, he has parlayed vague and generally ill-informed watermelon rhetoric into a moderately successful favour-currying machine. The practical result of this, combined with his bewildering belief in something called "sharing the proceeds of growth" between tax cuts and "public services" (which serve only to ensure there will, in fact, be little or no growth of which to share the proceeds), is that now there is no aspect of the modern Conservative Party which the average voter of less than 35 would recognise as remotely Conservative in any respect.

That is, of course, the point, but it makes it pretty strange that Cameron should arrange to have Arnold Schwarzenegger address the party conference this year. This is the man who introduced Milton Friedman's TV series Free to Choose in 1980, the man who voluntarily recorded nearly five (perforce hysterical) minutes of to-camera speech praising the socio-economic views of one of the most powerfully anti-state thinkers of the last century. If indirectly, Friedman was almost as potent an influence on Mrs. Thatcher as Hayek was - and now Cameron invites his disciple to address the Tories. They're united over their environmental "concerns", of course - although Arnie doubtless favours more freedom-friendly non-statist measures. I wonder to what extent he'll discuss that, and to what extent his speech will consist merely in evasive platitudes that are the hallmark of Cameron's tenure as leader.