Even David Cameron’s most enthusiastic backers in the 2005 leadership contest might have thought it unrealistic to imagine that after a little over two years in the job he would have opened up a nine point lead over Labour. But despite having done this, Cameron is still plagued by the question of whether the Tories should be further ahead.
Certainly, the Tories haven’t batted Labour out of the game and they are doing nowhere near as well as Tony Blair was in the mid-1990s. However, as Andrew Rawnsley reminds us in The Observer this morning, that was an exceptional time. Rawnsley, though, thinks that the Tories can not become the government in waiting until they give the electorate a firmer idea of what they would do once they are in power. To put it another way, they have won permission to be heard and now they need to say something.
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