James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
David Cameron is only taking a week off this Christmas. This is a pity, because he is facing a year that would test the stamina of a Spartan. From the moment politics resumes in the New Year, he’ll be in constant campaign mode. Then, if he wins, he’ll be governing a country in crisis; trying to push through unprecedented spending cuts and embarking on nothing less than the reordering of the relationship between the individual, society and the state. This may be his last chance in four years to recharge his batteries.
A proper holiday would also give him some time to reflect on his style of leadership. It would be churlish not to acknowledge that he is the most able and successful Tory leader since Thatcher; or that his opinion poll lead is the strongest of any postwar opposition leader other than Blair. Yet there is room for reasoned reflection on why the Tories are struggling to break the 40 per cent mark in the polls when they are up against a government that has nearly bankrupted the country.
Talk to any Cameron loyalist about why this is the case and they’ll cite the anti-politics mood in the country that has been exacerbated by the expenses crisis. But the Cameroons haven’t grasped that this mood requires a far more fundamental change to the way politicians operate than just transparency over expenses.
Take the Tory reaction to Labour’s plan to make both employers and employees pay more National Insurance. They rightly denounced this increase in the tax on jobs. It will lighten the pay packets of the ten million people who earn over £20,000 a year and make a ‘jobless recovery’ far more likely because it will be more expensive to employ people. The Tory attack, though, was somewhat stifled because they couldn’t say that they would repeal it. Rather, they said it was their ‘highest priority’ to avoid it. They thought this was a clever way to avoid being manacled to a policy. But to the average voter, it sounded like typical weasel words from a politician.
Because of the fiscal mess the country is in, if the Tories do succeed in getting elected, they will have to do unconservative things like raising taxes, letting prisoners out early and cancelling defence projects. Cameron will need the patience and loyalty of his party. But too little is being done to bind MPs to the project. One shadow Cabinet aide describes the leadership’s pitch to them as, ‘We’re ahead in the polls, follow us, you know it makes sense.’
Any day when the Tories are below 40 per cent in the polls the limitations of this strategy are obvious. As you make the two-minute stroll across Parliament from Star Chamber Court to Portcullis House, you will invariably be stopped by two or three Tory MPs wishing to complain about the closed nature of the leader’s circle. Too many people have been made to feel unloved.
This problem will grow after an election. Sitting MPs who don’t get a job straightaway fear that they are never likely to get one. Already, medium- and low-ranking front-benchers are fretting about being discarded to make way for favoured members of the 2010 intake. It is hard to manage the disappointed. Perhaps it is a sign of things to come that Graham Brady, who resigned over Cameron’s position on grammar schools, is the current favourite to be elected chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers after the next election.
Cameron will need a chief whip who is both respected by the parliamentary party and seen by it to be influential with the leadership. There are signs that the leadership understands this. Until the expenses scandal, Andrew MacKay, who was Cameron’s parliamentary fixer and part of the inner circle, had been lined up for this role.
The backbenches are not the only place from which trouble will come if the going gets tough. The shadow Cabinet is surprisingly disgruntled, with several members feeling they are not taken as seriously as they should be by the leadership.
Partly these problems stem from the way that Cameron and Osborne learned their trade. They cut their political teeth as operatives at Central Office and as special advisers. People doing these jobs tend to view most MPs and even most ministers as a nuisance and wish that they — the competent professionals — could be left to run things. But another part of the problem is the inability of British political parties to deliver different messages to different audiences.
The rumblings in the Tory party over the leadership’s acceptance of global warming are an example of this. An increasing number of Tory MPs are not inclined to accept the political consensus on climate change; at Tory country-house gatherings, global warming scepticism has replaced Europe as the issue of the day. But this problem could have easily been averted.
Those who tend to be most suspicious of all the global warming talk are generally those most worried about the Russian bear or another Opec strike. If Tory green rhetoric had been combined with an emphasis on energy security, then there would be far less opposition to it on the right. Steve Hilton, though, thought that this would undermine the party’s effort to establish its green credentials. So, when Liam Fox tried to make this argument to sceptical right-wingers early in the Cameron leadership, he was told it was not helpful. But the party should have been capable of communicating both a green message to centrist swing voters and an energy security one to its own base.
The most important thing Cameron should think about over Christmas, though, is why he wants to be Prime Minister. As the Times — normally favourable to Mr Cameron — opined last week, he has not yet conveyed a clear sense of this to the public. This means that the Tories lack a central compelling message, despite having a well-developed policy portfolio.
At the moment the plan is for the Tories to make an announcement each day in January. But these announcements will be worth less than the sum of their parts unless they are tied into a bigger argument about what the Tories would do for the country. The electorate needs a sense of what Britain would look like after four or five years of a Cameron government. If Cameron can’t give them that, he risks being able to take a whole month off next Christmas.
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