Cameron needs results that match his words

Further to James’s post on the Cameron interview, here’s what jumped out at me:

1. ‘Governments have difficult months. This government came together to dig this country out of the huge economic mess that it’s in…’ This is the official No.10 explanation about the last few months; that it’s the problems of the austerity agenda. As James Forsyth says in his political column in the current magazine, there are strongly-held alternative explanations.

2. ‘We’re not just a bunch of accountants dealing with the deficit…’ Cameron kicks off with this, an interesting phrase as it has been used by those criticising his Chancellor’s economic message. Osborne’s critics says he no agenda for growth, isn’t making the moral case for a smaller state, and speaks about deficit reduction as if he were an insolvency expert. The danger behind a deficit-focused economic policy is that when you start to tear up your deficit reduction timetable, as Osborne now has, you have no cards left to play. The government’s only commitment is on spending. There is no commitment on the deficit, progress on which is slipping

3. ‘…making sure our children are not burdened with debt,’ he says. A listener could be forgiven for thinking that he’s cutting the debt burden: his government is increasing debt more than Blair and Brown combined. From £1 trillion now to £1.4 trillion by the next election. I do think that Cameron ought to talk about the national debt in a way that makes clearer what he is doing. A recent poll showed only 9 per cent of us realizing the debt is rising. Given that 100 per cent of us will be paying off this debt, the government ought to be clearer about what it’s up to.

4. ‘Everything we’re doing — providing new schools that let your children soar…’ Except due to obstacles from his own government (explained here), he is not really providing new schools. The below chart looks at primaries only: the number needed each year to keep pace with the boom in pupils, and the number of ‘new schools’ provided:

5. ‘We have been having conversations with the Jordanians to seek the assurances we need [on Abu Qatada]. The Home Office checked the precedents, they acted correctly.’ He’s quite right, and, while deeply embarrassing, the kerfuffle about the date is not damaging. Cameron dealt with this very well, speaking clearly and rationally.

6. ‘We have a huge deficit and debt, and everyone has to play their part in dealing with it.’ Note his phrase, ‘dealing with the debt’, which is designed to give the impression of cutting debt when in fact his government is ‘dealing with the debt’ in the way that the late George Best dealt with drink. Cameron would have more support for his austerity agenda if he were honest that even now debt — and the burden on our children — is rapidly growing.

7. On Lords Reform: ‘All three parties supported a change in the House of Lords… but let’s be clear. It’s a very difficult change to make, and it can only go ahead if — because all the parties are split — if actually the parties decide to work together.’ Good luck to him with that. The Tories and Lib Dems are at war over this, and the Tories have made clear they’ll rebel en masse. The only ‘working together’ will be done by Labour MPs and Tory MPs to defeat the coalition government if it tried to press ahead with this.

8. ‘I try to have around me a very strong team of people,’ but not strong enough, according to several Cabinet members. Again, James Forsyth has lowdown about the Cabinet bust-up about over the strength of these people.

9. ‘Maybe once a week, sometimes once a fortnight — tragically, sometimes, once a month I manage to take my children to school.’ Cameron should be careful with this line of argument: it makes sense in Planet London. But worrying about a work-life balance is a luxury not everyone can afford. Not many fathers have the option of turning up later to work because they doing the school run. I suspect many commuters, listening to Cameron, would have growled — millions of them never get the chance to drop their kids off at school. Not because they don’t love them, or that they don’t want to be good parents, but because they’re working their guts out to make ends meet in a job where turning up on time is a non-negotiable part of the job.

10. ‘The big thing you have to do as PM is make a lot of judgment calls and decisions. The British public are incredibly fair-minded. They know you’ll get a lot of them right, but they know you’ll get some of them wrong.  What they want to know is that your average doesn’t fall too low.’ I’d put it a bit differently: that people don’t really tally an average, but decide whether the country is on the right track or wrong track. Polls in recent days have put the Tories between 9-13 points behind. Cameron’s interview was, as ever, eloquent and assuring — but people do tend to judge government by its results. Cameron does need a few more of those.

P.S. DavidDP and others point out that Osborne’s deficit target slipped because the economy slowed. This is correct, but when it did Osborne had a choice in the 2011 Autumn Statement: more cuts, or more debt? He chose more debt, and in so doing reverted to the deficit timetable outlined by Darling. Perhaps this was the best political and economic path — but I don’t think coalition ministers can say they have ‘held firm on deficit reduction’. As the above graph shows, they haven’t.