BRITAIN: Conservative leader David Cameron has made his boldest claim yet that it is he, and not Chancellor Gordon Brown, who is the natural successor to Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.
Continuing his repositioning of the Tory Party, Mr Cameron said his "new vision" for "modern, compassionate conservatism" was based on the twin principles of "trusting people and sharing responsibility."
He used a speech to the left-wing think-tank Demos to round on Tory critics who accused him of betraying conservatism but who, he said, had pulled the party to the right just as Mr Blair had moved Labour to the centre ground of British politics.
As Lord (Norman) Tebbit continued to criticise Mr Cameron's convergence on what he called the "morass" of centre-ground politics, Mr Cameron warned his detractors the Tories today were not facing the challenges of the 1970s.
He said Mr Blair's electoral success,which was based on acceptance of much of "the Thatcher revolution", had left the Conservatives with "an identity crisis" which had led it in turn to make "terrible strategic and tactical mistakes".
Reclaiming his own Thatcherite inheritance, Mr Cameron said: "Amongst many things that the Thatcher revolution changed was the Labour Party."
Gradually the Labour leadership came to realise "the changes of the 1980s were irreversible, because people didn't want to reverse them".
He said: "People didn't want to go back to clause 4, class warfare and industrial strife. A more middle-class Britain wanted a middle-class lifestyle based on a prosperous market economy.
"Tony Blair understood this . . . and people could see he understood it. So they could see that New Labour really was new."
However, he said: "There was something else that Tony Blair understood. He understood that some people had been left behind."
In point of fact, Mr Cameron said, Mr Blair had not been the first person to understand this.
Mrs Thatcher herself became increasingly worried that not everyone was participating in her "property-owning democracy". Mr Major in turn formulated the desire "to make Britain a truly classless society".
However, "it was Tony Blair who made the aims of a stronger economy and more decent society most explicit, with his twin focus on social justice and economic efficiency".
The aims were "not markedly different" from those of Mrs Thatcher and Mr Major "but they were new for Labour".
Thus, he said, the Conservatives as a party were left "opposing a prime minister who claimed that his aims were far closer to our own" and "from this fundamental fact sprang most of the difficulties" they had faced in the ensuing decade.