David Cameron must sometimes wonder if the gods are against his modernising project. Events have forced him back on to the traditional Tory territory of Europe and the economy.
This is not how the Cameroons expected it to be in the early days of his leadership. Then he defined himself not by his position on spending cuts or the repatriation of powers but by his urging the country to ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ while wearing a pair of recycled trainers. He was a different kind of Tory talking about a whole new set of issues.
In May 2007, Oliver Letwin, the modernisers’ intellectual godfather, gave a speech setting out the theory behind Cameron Conservatism. He declared that they wanted to bring about two important shifts in politics. The first was to move ‘the locus of debate from an econocentric paradigm to a sociocentric paradigm’. Straight after Letwin had spoken, one influential Tory told me that they planned to fight the next election on Britain’s social recession.
Four months later, the credit crunch caused a run on Northern Rock. Economics again dominated the political debate. Britain went into recession and its deficit and levels of debt ballooned. This necessitated a change in the Cameroon strategy. Questions about tax and spending could not be dealt with by a simple commitment to ‘share the proceeds of growth’. The Conservative party came, once again, to be defined in terms of economic choice.
The other part of the modernisation strategy was to downplay Europe as an issue. In his first party conference speech as leader, Cameron lamented that the Conservatives had left the centre ground. ‘Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life — we were banging on about Europe.’
But the European issue now dominates the Prime Minister’s agenda. His decision to use the British veto is fast coming to define his premiership. His party is more obsessed with Europe than ever before. Tory backbenchers are once again rushing to join various Eurosceptic parliamentary groupings.
It’s now become fashionable among Tories to mock the modernising project. An ever increasing number of people contend that, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like an ill-advised holiday from history. They like to speculate about what a strong position the party would be in now if it had concentrated on the dangers of excessive government spending or the euro’s fundamental flaws, rather than huskie-hugging.
To be sure, modernisation was not perfect. But those who took part in the election post-mortem point out that it was those first six months that established Cameron in the public’s mind as someone they could listen to. The problem was not the beginnings of his leadership but the failure to build on that initial progress. As one Tory insider puts it, ‘it was the first six months that got David into No. 10’. Now, however, many of the champions of modernisation believe that it should be retired, having been thanked for its role in detoxifying the Tory brand. But they fail to understand what modernisation at its best really was. It was a state of mind more than a set of policies.
Cameron’s first six months as leader were successful because he said things that Tories had not dared to say before. No piece of political turf was regarded as out of reach.
Once the financial crisis began, Cameron became far more cautious. The emphasis was on reassuring the public that he could be trusted not to do anything rash. This created an opening for Nick Clegg in the television debates. He was able to outflank the Tory leader, who was so intent on appearing to be a credible Prime Minister that he had stopped sounding like the change the country needed.
Cameron’s safety-first tactics were driven, in part, by a belief that the country would not vote for Gordon Brown. The election was perceived as being his to lose. His main concern was not making a mistake. This approach, unsurprisingly, did not inspire the electorate, and ultimately contributed to the Tories’ failure to win an overall majority, despite Brown’s obvious weaknesses.
The Cameroons are in danger of repeating this error. As No. 10 prepares for the coming year, the main divide is between those who want Cameron and the coalition to offer reassurance and those who want boldness.
Those who advocate reassurance maintain that, in these uncertain times, the public wants solidity not radicalism from its government. But underpinning their argument is a belief that the public won’t vote for Ed Miliband and that Labour have no one better to replace him with. There’s no need, therefore, for Cameron to take unnecessary risks.
Then there are those who argue for boldness. They say that the two great dangers for the coalition are appearing to lack any purpose beyond making spending cuts and allowing all the prophecies of doom to become self-fulfilling. They maintain that given the grim economic outlook for the western economy, it will take radical measures to foster growth.
The Prime Minister has not yet decided which path to take. In Brussels, he was bold. He did something that no British PM had ever previously dared do, and vetoed a treaty change. But this was, to a large extent, boldness forced upon him by Nicolas Sarkozy’s refusal to negotiate.
As Cameron reflects on his position over Christmas, he’d be well advised to remember his greatest success of 2011: the Libya campaign. Then, he was bold when it would have been far easier to see intervention as an unnecessary risk. It was also when he was most prepared to push back against official advice. In many ways his leadership then should provide a model for the rest of his premiership. But so far it has not.
One of the paradoxes of Cameron is that he’s at his best when he is boldest, but he tends towards complacency. Which of these attitudes wins out in the next year will determine the success or otherwise of the Cameron project.
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