Say not the struggle naught availeth

David Cameron has told friends he would like to be Foreign Secretary. 

He might have been a good one, for all his faults, had he suggested it when Theresa May became Prime Minister. 

Boris Johnson meanwhile has told his friends that he knows he will never be Prime Minister, which will relieve Europeans who think Boris some terrible bugbear.

Unlike Theresa May, or anyone else in the cabinet except Michael Gove, David Cameron has great ability. Boris also has great ability in making speeches and writing, of course, but
he is not made for administration. The problem with David Cameron is that, like his hero Harold Macmillan, who was once mine too (his son was my first boss), he is not a conservative but a Whig. Or maybe a liberal. He admits that the arch-liberal revolutionary Garibaldi is his great hero. 

I gave David Cameron the benefit of the doubt for far longer than I should have done, but he is fairly hard to distinguish from Tony Blair, as is Mrs. May. 

Seeing how left-wing they both are has changed my view of Mrs Thatcher completely. 

She was never a social conservative, which is what I thought a conservative ought to be, but she was not really, as I also thought, a class warrior, fighting for the lower middle class. And at least she was not a progressive. 

She did not care less how many woman sat on boards and said feminism was poison. She was the only woman admitted to the Carlton in her day. Mr. Cameron resigned from White's because they do not admit women as members, but has now been re-elected and spends much of his time there. 

She had strong Christian principles and was a leader. She believed in freedom. What short shrift she would have made of extending anti-discrimination laws, of single sex marriage and of transgender. She loved England.

I suppose I ought to have liked Mrs Thatcher, because I met her when I was 8 and had got separated from my old dad while visiting the House of Commons. She spent twenty minutes with us showing me historic coins (my passion then) and the terrace of the House of Commons, even though she was the busy Shadow Education Secretary.

I didn't think in the 1980s or 1990s that I'd come to admire her, but the whirligig of time plays many odd tricks. I never imagined that I could ever think ill of the Pope. 

What is happening now is that the Left has taken control of political discourse and use their position to prevent a very large number of opinions being voiced. The desirability of regaining national sovereignty was unusual in being a debate that the left did not close down. 

Their most heinous project is to try to make a thought crime of 'nativism'- a word from ante-bellum U.S. history that means not wanting a country to accept more immigrants. 

This, to quote one of the left's most objectionable Bolshevik heroines, shall not pass.

This interesting article by Eric Kaufman, 'Can anything arrest the polarisation of the West?', assumes that white people will be a minority in Western Europe by 2100. He says that 

the Left-wing ideological shift from class populism to pro-minority cosmopolitanism....has successfully made any meaningful discussion of immigration and national identity taboo, with mainstream parties until recently steering clear of such topics for fear of being branded ‘racist’.

He sees this as a problem because it allows UKIP, populists and Donald Trump to flourish, rather than because he wants to preserve the national identity of European countries. 

And just as rising immigration galvanises some people, the rise of populism galvanises others – those cosmopolitan voters that David Goodhart calls the ‘Anywheres’, who are bound together by a moral worldview, rather than ethnicity....
This can take on a quasi-religious quality – what African-American writer John McWhorter terms the “religion of anti-racism”, something especially visible on elite American university campuses. The outbreaks of political correctness since 2013 speak to a reaffirmation of what I would call Left-modernism, an ideology fusing cultural egalitarianism with anti-traditionalism that emerged in the 1920s but only achieved wide penetration from the 1960s.

He is anxious that we find a way or preventing polarisation between left and right over immigration and suggests intermarriage between ethnic groups as the solution.

I agree that intermarriage is doing and is going to do a lot of good to bind together fractured countries, but I certainly do not want an end to polarisation. 

I think the more polarisation between pro and anti-immigration people the better. Bring it on. Only in this way can immigration policy be very radically changed. 

There is no doubt which group of voters is very much bigger. And as the great A.J.P. Taylor said, nothing is inevitable till it happens.