David Cameron's recent offer to intervene in Libya, arming insurgents and enforcing a no-fly zone, was withdrawn almost as quickly as it was articulated. Objections from the US and France sank the idea. But it seems that the idea had enjoyed support from the cabinet, most of all from the hawkish faction around the education secretary Michael Gove – who is a signatory to the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society's statement of principles. Cameron, though no neocon, is a traditional Atlanticist, and has energetically promoted a small fraternity of foreign policy hawks since gaining the Tory leadership in 2005.
They first emerged in defence of Tony Blair and his unpopular foreign policies. Cameron himself, though he only reluctantly voted for the Iraq war, greatly admired Blair's stance in the debacle. Even he, though, could hardly match Gove's gushing praise for Blair in the runup to the Iraq war, in a column for the Times entitled "I can't fight my feelings any more: I love Tony". This passion for Blair was not restricted to his stance on foreign policy – it included Blair's position on the firefighters' strike, asylum seekers and tuition fees – but it was on Iraq that Gove maintained Blair was "behaving like a true Thatcherite". Indeed, for many Tories , Blair is neocon rex.
Gove is the author of a number of neoconservative tracts. These include Celsius 7/7, which argues that Islamists are waging "total war" against the west, not because of imperialism but because of their root-and-branch rejection of "western values". A more pointed intervention, though, was the essay "The Very British Roots of Neoconservatism and Its Lessons for British Conservatives". In it, Gove was trying to persuade Tory allies sceptical of the adventurism of Rumsfeld and Bush that their policies were ones that the great patriarchs of conservatism would approve of. He argued that neoconservatism had strongly British roots that could be traced back to the statecraft of the Anglo-Irish Tory leader George Canning, whose pre-emptive battles with Bonapartism helped "advance the cause of freedom". Palmerston and Churchill were also given their due as precursors to modern neoconservatism. Significantly, Gove's trinity was entirely composed of Tories with some connections to Liberalism – if a neoconservative is a liberal who has been "mugged by reality", many Tory luminaries from Burke onward have been instinctive Whigs turned counter-revolutionary.
Alongside Gove in the neoconservative faction are Ed Vaizey, the under-secretary of state who is, like Gove, has also signed up to the Henry Jackson Society's principles. Similarly, George Osborne, the chancellor, is a "signed up, card-carrying Bush fan", persuaded of the "excellent neoconservative case" for war with Iraq. His PPS, Greg Hands MP, is also a signatory to the Henry Jackson Society. Neoconservative ideas are also propagated in a number of thinktanks such as Policy Exchange whose director, Nicholas Boles MP, is another Henry Jackson Society signatory. The magazine Standpoint provides monthly ballast to this tendency.
Despite often crucial tactical differences, such as those which have emerged over Libya, there is a shared vocabulary between neoconservatives and those, like William Hague, who articulate a "liberal conservative" foreign policy. Hague has vocally supported "humanitarian intervention", and was reluctant to criticise even the more controversial stances of Blair, such as his support for the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This gave the Tories few opportunities to land any damaging blows against New Labour. Indeed, the "liberal interventionist" stance devised by Hague and Cameron amounts to reheated Blairism.
The neoconservative agenda is not restricted to foreign policy, but includes a securitarian drive to contain Islamism and propagate "British values". Cameron's recent speech announcing the failure of multiculturalism can be seen as a tilt toward the neoconservatives in his cabinet. Yet the neoconservative temptation is a dangerous one for Cameron to succumb to. It offers moral and intellectual definition to an aggressive but vacillating government lacking legitimacy. If Cameron is a poorly defined leader, neoconservative belligerence can provide a far more robust political direction than the "big society". But Cameron still needs his Liberal allies, and the electoral base for neoconservatism is smaller even than for the aggressive Thatcherism he jettisoned in opposition. If Cameron were to openly embrace the neoconservative agenda, it would be a retreat from the electoral coalition-building that has temporarily saved the Tories from irrelevance.
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