James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
Even the Tories accept that they can’t go like this. For a while, David Cameron thought he could maintain his safety-first strategy and leave Labour to tear itself apart. But with the polls returning to hung parliament territory, the high command now accepts that there is a need for a course correction. This is welcome news. Recognising there is a problem is the first step to recovery.
The problem is that the Tories are barely hitting 40 per cent in the polls despite the fact that they are running against a tired and discredited government led by a man whom most of the Cabinet, let alone the public, can’t abide. The root cause of this problem is that they have no central message. The party’s posters all bear the tagline ‘year for change’. But beyond this, the Tories struggle to explain what change they will bring apart from not being Gordon Brown. Admittedly, the biggest change that the Tories are committed to — their plan to make the workings of government transparent — is inherently abstract. But it is hard to see what the change they are offering is when they are flying off to Davos, signing up the government’s former adviser Lord Stern, committing to carry on with Mr Brown’s style of inflation targeting and promising that any cuts made in 2010-11 will not be ‘particularly extensive’.
By downplaying the cuts, the Tories have given Labour an opening to argue that everyone accepts the deficit is a problem that must be put off for another day. Tory rhetoric about the deficit being a ‘clear and present danger’ to the economy loses its impact when they are going to do so little about it in year one.
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