There’s been a lot of attention over the past few days as to whether George Osborne is too political. But what should really worry Tories is not how political George Osborne is, but how unpolitical Number 10 is.
There are far too many Tories who think that politics is something you do in opposition not government. This view is profoundly mistaken. As I say in my column this week, city mayors were a major plank of David Cameron’s vision for reviving England’s cities. Yet all but one of the mayoral referendums were lost. Why? Because voters were never shown that mayors wouldn’t just be another politician. The Number 10 machine failed to find the kind of inspiring figures who’d have made people see the merits of the idea. What makes this all the odder is that Cameron himself never really hit the phones to try and persuade people to come forward as candidates. Saying no to someone from CCHQ is one thing, saying no to the Prime Minister is quite another.
This pattern is repeating itself with police and crime commissioners. An excellent policy idea, and one that should be a boon to the Tories politically seeing it is an election fought on their turf, is being let down by the caliber of the candidates.
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