Cameron’s secret plan if he fails next week is to carry on regardless

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader knows that his campaign to win over the Lib Dem voters may not succeed in the local elections. But he has decided not to change his strategy a jot: the chameleon’s not for turning

David Cameron could hardly wish for a better backdrop to next week’s English local elections. The Home Secretary admits that a thousand foreign ex-convicts have slipped the deportation net and been left at large. The Health Secretary is heckled by union workers and spectacularly mishandles a National Health Service crisis. Donors in the loans-for-ermine scandal are demanding their money back, and the Deputy Prime Minister confesses to an extramarital affair. And yet, in spite of all this, no one in Conservative headquarters dares predict any sign of a breakthrough for the party on Thursday.

The election is evidently Cameron’s first big test, but no one on his team will admit as much. ‘If we do well, we’ll say it was all to do with David,’ says one shadow Cabinet member. ‘If it goes horribly wrong, we’ll blame local factors.’ A recent ICM poll showed that while Labour has indeed been pushed to its lowest opinion-poll rating since 1987, voters are running straight to the Liberal Democrats or minority parties.

On a personal basis, Cameron’s polling could scarcely be better, but it is not generating prospective votes. ‘It is as if Cameron and the Conservatives are two entirely separate concepts,’ says one baffled insider. I am told that Oliver Letwin, the Tories’ head of policy, now says that the Conservative brand is fundamentally broken, and only extraordinary change will give the party any chance of returning to government. Unless public perception changes drastically, he argues, all is lost. Francis Maude, the party chairman, has several flipcharts that reinforce Letwin’s morbid analysis.

The mood among Cameron’s closest lieutenants may be bleak, but there a surprising optimism in party headquarters as it prepares for the elections in 4,360 of England’s 19,580 council seats — most in urban areas where the Tory machinery is at its most decayed.