Saatchi 'centre ground' warning

Lord Saatchi urged Tories to reassert their ideology

Former Conservative Party chairman Lord Saatchi has warned the party off the "say anything to get elected" culture.

The advertising guru, credited with the 1979 "Labour isn't working" campaign, said an obsession with the "centre ground" had helped fuel voter apathy.

He said even the Tories, keen to shed their "nasty" image, had succumbed.

A simple "moral vision" was needed, he said in a think-tank lecture, otherwise politics was reduced to "claim and counter-claim about delivery", he said.

He does not mention current Conservative leader David Cameron by name in his Centre for Policy Studies lecture "In Praise of Ideology", but points to a widespread acceptance of the "myth" that "you can only win elections from the centre ground".

'Spectre of Thatcherism'

Of the Conservatives, he said: "Hurt by long years of condemnation for ice-cold brutishness, and anxious to avoid contamination with the 'Spectre of Thatcherism', it attempted to shed its 'nasty' image with a simple move from Right to Left."

He urges British Conservatives to leave the centre ground and reassert their ideology.

While Conservatism has a deep belief in "a free and independent individual", Labour "makes as many people as possible dependent on it", he claimed.

The lecture mirrors comments he made in the wake of Conservative defeat in last year's general election.

Then he told the party: "If you stand for something you will have people for you and people against you. But if you stand for nothing you will have nobody for you and nobody against you."