That’s the difference between North and South Korea

How capitalists can win the argument

by Danien Hannan

If I had to identify the most successful conservative leader of my lifetime, I’d point without hesitation to Australia’s John Howard. Winning four elections (to Reagan’s two and Thatcher’s three), the amiable cricket-lover used his time in office to make transformative changes, giving Australia a growth rate it hadn’t known since the gold rush.

Like all great leaders, John Howard embodies his country’s loftiest traits: cheerfulness, candour, confidence, largeness of spirit. Although he comes across as, for want of a better phrase, an ordinary bloke, John is quietly more ideological than you’d think. The secret of his success was to advance conservative ideas in an undogmatic and demotic fashion.

Which is, of course, the winning combination for Right-wing parties in all democracies. Most of the things they stand for are individually popular: tax cuts, immigration controls, patriotism, law and order. But these things are best sold in an undoctrinaire way.

John has just stood down after twelve years as Chairman of the International Democrat Union, a global alliance of some 60 Right-of-Centre parties, including the US Republicans, British Tories and German Christian Democrats. I’ve just come back from his last meeting, the IDU summit in Seoul, which I attended as Secretary-General of theAlliance of European Conservatives and Reformists.

Looking around the table, I was struck by how urgently some of the assembled parties needed to copy John Howard’s winning formula. The key to success is not to move to what pundits call the Centre. If it were, John Major would have been a more successful leader than Margaret Thatcher, George Bush Snr than Ronald Reagan. The key, rather, is to get across that most conservative policies are common sense.

Several conservative parties are floundering because they can’t get this right. In much of Latin America, for example, traditional parties have been hammered by Left-wing populists since the late 1990s. While some Latin Rightists understand the extent to which they need to change, others can’t overcome their sense of entitlement – their belief that administration ought to be the business of people like them, with fair skins and recognised surnames. In Europe, meanwhile, conservatives have struggled to recover from their fatal association with the bailouts and the euro – an association that places them on the side of corporatism rather than of markets.

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