The government is struggling to retain its reputation for competence.
The government is struggling to retain its reputation for competence. Ministerial ineptitude has become a dangerously large part of the major news stories in recent weeks, from the Libyan crisis to the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew. This should worry the coalition, because the public will not support government cuts or reforms to public services if people believe it is incapable of carrying them out.
Appearing competent is a prerequisite for successful government. The government will only get credit for what goes right if it is seen to be in charge. The team in No. 10, which has its share of veterans of the Major era, remembers that the economic recovery of the 1990s reaped no political dividend because the Tory reputation for economic competence had been destroyed on Black Wednesday.
Labour are well aware, too. They remember that the Brown government never recovered from the sense of incompetence created by its decision to bottle out of an election planned for October 2007. They also know that the bounce in the polls which tempted Gordon Brown to go to the country was created by the government’s steady handling of the attempted terror attacks, the floods and the foot-and-mouth outbreak of that summer. A competent government shapes events, an incompetent one is buffeted by them.
Ed Miliband’s team has now begun a full-blooded attempt to undermine the coalition’s reputation on this front. As one Labour source puts it, ‘we want to expose them as combining the ideology of Margaret Thatcher with the competence of John Major’.
This approach is designed for the 24-hour news cycle. Conservatives, now they are in government, complain that in our news-mad culture ‘every tiny slip-up is magnified into a disaster’.
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