It has been a remarkable week for the bright young Tories who worked for John Major in the 1992 election campaign. At the time, David Cameron, Steve Hilton and their friends were young praetorians who, after the Conservatives were returned to office, credited themselves with snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. They nearly did the opposite in May, but there was no sense of disappointment at the Tory party conference in Birmingham. It looked and felt more like a victory parade for the New Establishment.
The word Conservative could hardly be seen inside the conference hall, and the chosen motto, ‘Together in the national interest’‚ suggests coalition rather than party. But Mr Cameron and his lieutenants proudly eschew tribal politics. The proposal to withdraw child benefit from top-rate taxpayers is typical of their style and strategy: it inflicts pain on their core supporters as a means of decontaminating their brand. The aim is to answer the accusation which stings the Cameroons the most: that this group of wealthy political leaders are in politics to protect their own kind. It was a formula used by the Blairites: to seek to rise above party politics, to eschew ideology — and focus on the practical and the politically palatable.
This is why Mr Cameron is so comfortable with coalition government: he and Nick Clegg see politics in broadly the same way, and share the same pedigree. An elite school, then Oxbridge, then politics, public relations or a permutation thereof.
This is why the coalition has been so harmonious, with none of the bickering or sclerosis one might have expected. And there is substance as well as style. The left v. right political axis is being steadily supplanted by liberalism v. state control. This agenda, which divided New Labour when Tony Blair was in power, now binds a coalition with an agenda as radical as any put before a Conservative party conference. School reform, welfare reform, spending reform, NHS reform — all involve unclenching the fist of government.
When Clegg joined the coalition, he innocently asked George Osborne how the Cameroon set all knew each other. The reply took 20 minutes, and would have broadly resembled the graph on page 18. They are a close-knit group, who have worked and holidayed together — and have overlapping friends throughout the political and media classes. The days when Labour were union men and Tories businessmen are long gone. Both parties are run by people who have spent most of their adult lives (and, in Clegg’s case, his school years) in and around Westminster.
The problem is obvious: this globalised elite is a small world. The New Establishment moves in herds from SW1 to W10, then (as Rachel Johnson argues on page 16) down the M4 by Renault Espace to Wiltshire. They are more familiar with the south of France than with Scotland or the north of England — and, judging by the election result, the feeling is reciprocated. They are taken by surprise at just how deeply someone balancing a mortgage and family on £44,000 a year objects to being regarded as rich. Westminster is the worst place from which to detect the mood of the country.
One cannot fault Cameron’s ambition. This Old Etonian is becoming the scourge of old establishments — from the teaching unions to the defence chiefs to the NHS bureaucracy. For a Prime Minister to take on so much, all at once, is remarkable. To do it jointly with the Lib Dems is extraordinary. The gang of 1992 have found that their lack of ideological baggage has allowed a radical agenda to take root in this coalition era. But to transform a country, one needs to fully understand it. Mr Cameron’s lieutenants are undoubtedly astute. But their shallow gene pool remains one of the government’s greatest vulnerabilities.
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