The background to the Tory modernisation project was, of course, the shattering defeat of 1997. For the previous two years — in an atmosphere reminiscent of today — the Tory party had raged and revolted. When the election results came in, Conservatives also lost their collective senses. And into this mad maelstrom the modernisers plunged. Their rolling coup experienced setbacks, but it eventually prevailed. First, they gathered around Michael Portillo. Then after his withdrawal, successively supporting and later destroying William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, they shrewdly used Michael Howard to promote one of their own, in the pliable form of David Cameron. Politics is a brutal game. But for sustained personal unpleasantness the Conservative modernisers deserve some kind of award. In private and in print, their long campaign was carried on in a tone of consistently venomous contempt. One can debate whether they then constituted a "movement" (as some of them called themselves) or a faction (as they have now become). In truth, there were always several distinct strands.

One strand, prominent in the early phase, constituted neo-Thatcherites. These were social liberals who, unlike Margaret Thatcher herself, saw the Thatcher project as one of pure liberalism and, more closely reflecting J.S. Mill's conceptions, wished to see the removal of social as well as economic constraints. This group's agenda focused on sexual liberation, where they have largely been successful, and on a permissive policy towards drugs, where — so far, at least — they have failed. 

More important, however, were a group of former adherents of the Labour Party and the SDP. They had never supported the Thatcher government. They had quickly given up on Major. And they were now completely smitten by Tony Blair. They had an egalitarian rather than classically liberal outlook, but they were not tempted by even the revamped Labour Party, and they sought, instead, to apply Blairism to the Conservative Party, whose carcass they now colonised and, in due course, controlled. The assumption they made was that the real problem of the Conservative Party was, in a word, its conservatism — that is the propensity to resist change, not just within the party but within society. This, in turn, gave modernisation a revolutionary timbre. Its advocates talked in millenarian tones about the dreadful future unless "change" was embraced. Conservatism must be discarded by the Tories, just as socialism was discarded by Labour, as a condition for winning. And conservatism regarding the fundamental institutions of society, including marriage, should equally be purged from the system.

There was an unusual overlap between this essentially leftish group and another — the up-and-coming professionals within the Conservative Party, mainly reared within the Conservative Research Department. Some had become government advisers, but the advice they gave was usually on presentation, not on the substance of policy, in which they had little interest. (This has proved a problem since.) They, too, thought that the party's image had to change, though their instincts and backgrounds were on the Centre-Right. David Cameron, George Osborne, and a number of key ministers and current advisers hailed from this group.