This warning shot hasn’t been fired from outside the Westminster beltway. Like the Prime Minister and his Deputy, the CVs of the book’s five MP co-authors have an insidery feel. Priti Patel, who led in writing the book’s sections on criminal justice, was a press secretary to William Hague when he was leader of the opposition. Dominic Raab, who has a big interest in foreign affairs, was David Davis’s chief of staff when the latter served as shadow home secretary. Chris Skidmore, who specialises in the public services, has advised Michael Gove on schools policy. Elizabeth Truss, whose piece for this paper introduced the book as a whole, helped to run a think-tank.  Only Kwasi Kwarteng, whose area of expertise is the economy, has previously avoided working within the SW1 postcode. But he, too, is well-connected: as a former member of the controversial A-list of Parliamentary candidates, Kwarteng won vigorous support from the party in his search for a seat. This is not to say that he is a lightweight: indeed, there is much more to the co-authors than a flick through their employment history would suggest. Kwarteng is a serious historian, who has somehow found time this year not only to co-write with his fellow MPs but also to pen a book about the legacy of the British Empire.  So is Skidmore, who has written a biography of Edward VI. Truss has a pre-Conservative political history: raised by Left-leaning academics, she was an active Liberal Democrat at University. Raab is the member of the quintet who has troubled the Whips most, summing up the Commons motion opposing votes for prisoners which represented the biggest surge against the Government from the Tory back benches to date. In his energetic way, he has also agitated for tougher strike legislation and reformed equality laws (on the latter clashing with Theresa May, who disliked his description of some feminists as “obnoxious bigots”). He has also contributed to another Tory book to be published shortly – one edited by his old boss, David Davis.  Add them all together, and you have something different not only from the rose garden politics that followed the election, but from the Conservative election manifesto that preceded it. Cameron’s liberal conservatism has the flavour of the old rectory in which he was raised: emollient in tone and paternalistic in flavour – he worries about firms manufacturing bras for children and shops distributing chocolate oranges near checkouts – it is summed up in his idea of the Big Society. The five co-authors are liberal conservatives, too, but of a different kind. Their ideas, when rolled together – balanced budgets, a “right to own” in social housing, a foreign policy that “puts Britain first” – have a different stress, and one that can be summed up in two words: individual responsibility.  “The state cannot do everything: while the Government can help, it can never fully solve any individual’s problems,” Truss wrote in this paper on Monday. That word, “individual”, has been out of fashion in Conservative thinking recently. While Margaret Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, Cameron, with his cry of “we’re all in it together”, might almost have claimed that there is no such thing as the individual. The authors would not agree. Indeed, much of the book, written against the grim backdrop of Britain’s troubled economy, is a defence of the virtuous citizen against corrupting interests: protected corporate managers, insulated bankers, public sector monopolies.  There is much else in the book. On Scotland, for example, the authors are bold: they want to tear up the Barnett formula. On Europe, they are rather less so, shying away from a full-scale repatriation of powers. But it would be a mistake to look only at the message that After the Coalition sends about policy and miss the one it is conveying about politics. Cameron rightly believes that Government reshuffles cause more pain than gain, but will surely have to carry one out within the next year. The new Conservative intake of MPs represents almost half the party in the Commons, and this book is a calling card as well as a manifesto – not simply on the authors’ own behalf (though none of them have kissed ambition farewell), but on that of a whole new body of Parliamentarians.  I doubt if Truss and her fellow authors have much time for Hegel, who idealised the state, but an idea attributed to him – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – helps to understand their book. First there was Thatcher, with her blue-in-tooth-and-claw conservatism. Then came Cameron with his modernisation. And now this book arrives, presenting a bundle of ideas which, like hers, are rooted in personal responsibility but which, like Cameron’s, accepts “modern Britain as it is” – being so relaxed about sex and race as to make a fuss about neither. This may just be the shape of the conservatism of the future. It is certainly a relief to find a new Tory book co-written by three members of ethnic minorities and two women that seeks to make nothing of the fact whatsoever.
Individual responsibility will be at the heart of the new Conservatism - and    the Prime Minister should take note.