Now is the time for Tories to shine

The current financial crisis and the Government's poor showing in the polls mean that if the Conservative Party is to take advantage, it really needs to step up to the mark now.

The Conservative Party deserves some sympathy at the moment, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. If our government is only a "spectator at this circus", the Tories "cannot even get inside the big top". For all Cameron's grave-sounding speeches, their conference has been rendered "irrelevant" by events in Washington. Yet a "reliable and well-informed" opposition could make a useful contribution. It could, for example, say that to restore the soundness of our economy we must slash borrowing and rein in spending, and make structural reforms that would stimulate the productive sectors of our economy. Unfortunately, because "nobody with any seniority in the Conservative Party has the experience to undertake such a task", none of this is being said.

That's not fair, said Janet Daley, also in The Daily Telegraph. Cameron has "stated unequivocally" that the nationalisation of institutions as the only alternative to "failures of judgment and incompetence in private finance" is both "wrong and dangerous". Politicans are no less fallible than bankers, but "when they screw up they take the wealth of the entire tax-paying nation down with them". Cameron knows this, hence his plan to allow the independent Bank of England to take responsibility for restructuring failing banks as an alternative to nationalisation, which puts them under the direct control of government. We should be "profoundly grateful" that he is holding firm in spite of the "giddy anti-capitalist barrage": he seems to have a "clear grasp of the difference between failure of the market system and the perversion of it through human error".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.