The Conservatives’ Major anxiety

There’s a spectre haunting the Conservative party, the spectre of a voteless recovery. Under the gothic arches of the House of Commons, small groups of Tory MPs stand around nervously debating whether ‘it’s John Major all over again’. Their fear is that a Conservative government will preside over an economic recovery but receive scant thanks for it from the voters.

This concern has been sparked by a dire set of weekend newspaper headlines for the party. What worried MPs, and even some ministers, most was that these awful front pages followed a week in which the government actually had quite a lot of good news to talk about. Unemployment, crime and NHS waiting times were all down.

Those who were in Major’s Downing Street are adamant that the parallel is wrong. They point out that negative media coverage of the government hasn’t become institutionalised yet. David Cameron’s conference speech, for instance, received the kind of reviews that Major could only have dreamed of after Black Wednesday.