Stephen Harper should be a Tory icon

Canada's election on 14 October is... Wait! Come back! I'm going somewhere with this! For reasons I have never understood, many Brits see Canada through American eyes as dull and - despite its vastness - somehow gnomic. The lack of coverage here is downright shameful.

Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is perhaps the most Anglophile leader in the world. Shortly after taking office, he made a beautiful speech in London about what Canada owed to the mother country - a radical break with what had until then been the official line, namely that Canada was a happy multi-culti fusion drawing equally on the traditions of French settlers, Native Americans, Yugoslavs, blah blah. His speech went wholly unreported.

British politicians could learn a thing or two from Harper. At a time when virtually every incumbent government is suffering from the

recession, his Tories might increase their numbers. Not bad when you remember that, in 1993, Canada's Conservatives were left with just two MPs. So how did Harper do it?

Well, he stopped fretting about the handful of Liberal-Tory floating voters, and went after the 40 per cent of Canadians who had stopped voting altogether. He shed his party's Establishment image, and embraced an anti-politician, decentralist, tax-cutting agenda. His party duly lost support in the posher parts of Toronto, but more than made it up in suburban and rural Canada - including Quebec. ("There are guys out there who listen to French talk radio and French country music", Harper's chief strategist told me).

The result? Canada is becoming less like Scandinavia, more like the rest of the Anglosphere - though, anticipating the charge of being American patsies, the Tories have adroitly picked a fight with their neighbours over the Northwest Passage. Canada's Conservatives, in short, have made their country freer, richer and safer. It's about time the rest of the world noticed.