From Mr Alistair Cooke Sir: At Michael Heseltine's suggestion Peta
Buscombe came to see me at Conservative Central Office in the early 1990s when I was running the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) — now renamed (unnecessarily) the Conservative Policy Forum (CPF). It was established as part of the postwar revival of Conservatism to enable party members to participate in the making of policy. As a result she became involved in her local constituency CPC discussion group. Throughout the country loyal Tories of all backgrounds used to meet together to consider key political issues and to make recommendations for me to pass on to ministers. Women were well represented in this national network of discussion groups, and in some constituencies indeed were the leading forces within it. Not a single bottle of jam was made. I saw no evidence of the so-called racism on which there has been too much recent comment. The chief weakness was that found throughout the party: the dearth of people who had not yet reached retirement age.
During the last few years Peta Buscombe has been looking for bright new schemes to create a role for women in the mainstream of the party's affairs. She should have concentrated her efforts on making one of the most valuable of the party's well-established institutions as effective as possible. To achieve that, the party leader and his colleagues have got to start treating the results of grassroots policy-discussions seriously. That was a task that always defeated me.
Alistair B. Cooke
London SW1
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