Always lurking in the undergrowth

One of the pitfalls of historians is adopting the Whig interpretation of history. Using that methodology they tend to take a current situation and write history backwards from there, thereby making the present the result of a historical determinism. Some Marxists use the same sort of theoretical thinking to highlight the seeming inevitability of the collapse of capitalism and the steady march to a communist future, albeit with the odd step backwards on the march from time to time.
Another similar problem occurs when a historian has a pet subject and then decides to make the present fit in to that framework. David Marquand, writing in The Guardian this morning, appears to have merged the two techniques and come up with the conclusion that David Cameron is a Whig (for the benefit of Godzilla who comments here from time to time, that doesn’t mean he wears a hairpiece).
However, I think much of Maquand’s analysis is correct. To the dismay of many Labour members, but I suspect to even more Tories, David Cameron is not Margaret Thatcher in drag, waiting to throw off the blue two-piece and shock the nation with public spending cuts, repealing the Lisbon Treaty, and mass privatisation with what remains of the public services whilst rioters on the streets attack the police and demand a repeal of his new unfair taxes on the poor. It’s not going to happen.
Remember the demon eyes? They tried to portray Tony Blair as the smooth face of reason behind which lurked an old fashioned statist (to use Marquand’s peculiar description) Labour politician who would repeal the anti-trade union laws and make ‘red Robbo’ his Minister of Trade, re-nationalise the Steel industry, re-open the pits and we would end up with the dead not being buried whilst the litter mounted up on the roadside. Hey, some Labour supporters even prayed that they were correct… but they were sadly let down.
I suspect the reality is, and I’ve said this a few times over the last couple of years so I apologise for being a bit repetitive, that Cameron is just the latest in our two-party game of political leapfrog. If he is elected he will continue to modify Blairism, in exactly the same way that Blair modified Thatcherism… and so on. The membership of our political parties almost certainly have sharp ideological divisions… but do their Leaders? When Crossman became Wilson’s Minister of Housing in 1964 he found himself in the tea rooms one day talking to one of his Conservative predecessors. Crossman told him about all of the paperwork the civil servants had piled on to him, including some proposals that he found completely unacceptable. Oh yes, said his opposite number, we threw those out too!
I mention that little anecdote because I suspect, eventually, the civil servants got their way with their housing proposals. They knew that even when Crossman left office (just two years later)… they would still be there. And I strongly suspect that if the Brown’s move out of No. 10, the senior civil servants will be filling up David Cameron’s in-tray with the same stuff they served up to Gordon Brown before the furniture wagon has arrived in Downing Street.