Angels in marble

A former member of the Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher writes in Prospect about days gone by for the Conservative party:

The Thatcher approach was to preach a message and then try to put it into effect. No less important, the Thatcher assumption was that the preaching would be persuasive because somewhere in the depths of the British national psyche it would strike a chord. Just as Disraeli saw working-class Tories as "angels in marble" - that is, natural conservatives awaiting only the inspired touch of the sculptor to emerge as Conservative voters - so Thatcher and her closest colleagues believed in a natural conservative majority.

How different things were back then.