Forget the issue of who might make a plausible new leader for the Conservative Party - the question is, can the Prime Minister reinvent himself now that the modernisation project is dead
By
Janet Daley
There isn’t going to be any noteworthy challenge to David Cameron’s leadership
before the general election – OK? All the serious players in the
Conservative Party I have talked to over the past week regard the
self-appointed combatants in the latest phoney war as either risible or
hopelessly precipitate. The real battle is not over who might be a plausible
new leader, but over the evolving identity of the present one. So the next
few months are going to be consumed not by a contest over succession but by
a fight for the Prime Minister’s soul. The need for a clear, unambiguous
sense of the Tories’ fundamental purpose is now universally accepted, and
there is some lively betting on how successfully Mr Cameron can metamorphose
into the personification of that sharper message.
Over the next two years, the Conservative Party is going to have to disengage itself not only from the blurred, deliberate ambivalence and fudge of Coalition politics, but also from the confusion created by its own insistence on reinventing itself. Not to put too fine a point on it, the modernisation project is dead. Whatever credibility might have clung to it – even after the economic crisis made its obsession with appearance over substance look like vainglorious posturing – disappeared altogether with the gay-marriage vote. Persevering with green taxes and ring-fenced overseas aid budgets may have been exasperatingly obtuse after the 2008 crash. But the expenditure of political time and energy on what looked like a politically correct semantic point must have been the final straw for a significant majority of the Right-of-centre target voters in our opinion poll today.
Downing Street shows every sign that it has learnt the lesson. Publicly, it is being admitted that ways can be found to channel overseas aid through British businesses so that it is not seen as simply a giveaway. Privately, to backbenchers on the Right, the Prime Minister has hinted that he is receptive to traditional Tory economic policies: cutting capital gains tax or a possible public-spending freeze. But this will mean extricating himself and his leadership from the mindset that modernising left behind: a vague, confused terror of “bad” headlines. For what remains of the modernising project is cowardice, a superstitious terror of phrases (“lurch to the Right”, “same old Tories”) with magical powers. So, in all his official pronouncements, Mr Cameron must pre-empt the demonic words: he is not lurching one way or the other. He is staying exactly where he is. He is not going to be swayed from his chosen course by mercurial public opinion.
In last week’s party political broadcast, he dismissed the idea that there could be any “easy answers” – as if all those who suggested remedies (such as tax cuts) to our problems must be glib simpletons. But to say that there are no “easy” answers doesn’t mean there are no answers. It is certainly true that, given the Conservatives’ starting position, reducing taxes on business, say, might not be easy in political terms. It will take some bold, courageous justification, and quite a lot of unflinching conviction. Not easy, no – but worthwhile because it is what the economy desperately needs. What Mr Cameron is trying to imply with his no-lurching, no-easy-answers talk is that all the possible courses of action that are being put forward are equally extreme, and that by disdaining all of them he is remaining moderate and reasonable. So here it is again – the ghost of the modernising project that cries out in its terrible voice from beyond the grave. In order for the Tories to be electable, it wails, they must always be on the Centre Ground – which is to say, in the strict mathematical centre of every debate.
This insistence that demands from the Right and the Left must be equally fanatical and therefore anathema to the electorate does not stand up to either logical examination or factual evidence. Far more useful and meaningful than “the centre ground” is the phrase coined by Keith Joseph, “the common ground”, with which Mr Cameron has begun, quite pointedly, to replace it. Presumably, this is wherever the great mass of the population professes itself to be. So if, for example, the overwhelming majority of voters express a desire for a harder line on immigration, or for more support for traditional families, then those positions are on the common ground of politics and deserve to be respected.
By a remarkable coincidence, an ICM poll last week showed very considerable majorities saying that adopting both those things would make the Conservatives more likely to be elected. And this was not just the view of Tory voters, but of Labour and Liberal Democrat ones as well. On immigration, 60 per cent of Labour voters and 62 per cent of Lib Dem ones thought a tougher line would help the Tories. On helping “traditional families”, the figure in favour was 62 per cent for both Labour and the Lib Dems. So where exactly is the centre (or common) ground? If you insist that being tougher on immigration and being supportive of traditional families are “extreme” positions, then you are effectively repudiating the views of the great bulk of the population. Somehow, the notion of what constitutes reasonable (non-extreme) public opinion has moved on in a way that the self‑absorbed Tory myth-makers have rather missed. In their fixation with the attitudes of 1997, they have failed to notice that the centre has walked out from under them.
Times are much harder now than they were when the Tories first decided they needed a softer image. They seem not to have noticed that people are less outraged about spending cuts (which have general support) than they are by tax rises and increases in the cost of living. Voters who do not see themselves as remotely “extreme” are particularly aggrieved by the discrepancy between what the Tories say they believe in (aspiration, personal responsibility, marriage, etc) and the effect of their taxation policies (which penalise those things). Caught between a modernising credo that now looks as out of date as an avocado bathroom, and an electorate that hungers for forceful, decisive action, they try to split the difference and lose out all around.
Lynton Crosby, a man with a gift for understanding the real common ground, has arrived on the Tory strategy team and sent the ghost of modernisation into a caterwauling frenzy. He is said to be convinced that the Tory operation needs to focus on a few clear, consistent messages that will truly resonate with voters. I’ll say.
Over the next two years, the Conservative Party is going to have to disengage itself not only from the blurred, deliberate ambivalence and fudge of Coalition politics, but also from the confusion created by its own insistence on reinventing itself. Not to put too fine a point on it, the modernisation project is dead. Whatever credibility might have clung to it – even after the economic crisis made its obsession with appearance over substance look like vainglorious posturing – disappeared altogether with the gay-marriage vote. Persevering with green taxes and ring-fenced overseas aid budgets may have been exasperatingly obtuse after the 2008 crash. But the expenditure of political time and energy on what looked like a politically correct semantic point must have been the final straw for a significant majority of the Right-of-centre target voters in our opinion poll today.
Downing Street shows every sign that it has learnt the lesson. Publicly, it is being admitted that ways can be found to channel overseas aid through British businesses so that it is not seen as simply a giveaway. Privately, to backbenchers on the Right, the Prime Minister has hinted that he is receptive to traditional Tory economic policies: cutting capital gains tax or a possible public-spending freeze. But this will mean extricating himself and his leadership from the mindset that modernising left behind: a vague, confused terror of “bad” headlines. For what remains of the modernising project is cowardice, a superstitious terror of phrases (“lurch to the Right”, “same old Tories”) with magical powers. So, in all his official pronouncements, Mr Cameron must pre-empt the demonic words: he is not lurching one way or the other. He is staying exactly where he is. He is not going to be swayed from his chosen course by mercurial public opinion.
In last week’s party political broadcast, he dismissed the idea that there could be any “easy answers” – as if all those who suggested remedies (such as tax cuts) to our problems must be glib simpletons. But to say that there are no “easy” answers doesn’t mean there are no answers. It is certainly true that, given the Conservatives’ starting position, reducing taxes on business, say, might not be easy in political terms. It will take some bold, courageous justification, and quite a lot of unflinching conviction. Not easy, no – but worthwhile because it is what the economy desperately needs. What Mr Cameron is trying to imply with his no-lurching, no-easy-answers talk is that all the possible courses of action that are being put forward are equally extreme, and that by disdaining all of them he is remaining moderate and reasonable. So here it is again – the ghost of the modernising project that cries out in its terrible voice from beyond the grave. In order for the Tories to be electable, it wails, they must always be on the Centre Ground – which is to say, in the strict mathematical centre of every debate.
This insistence that demands from the Right and the Left must be equally fanatical and therefore anathema to the electorate does not stand up to either logical examination or factual evidence. Far more useful and meaningful than “the centre ground” is the phrase coined by Keith Joseph, “the common ground”, with which Mr Cameron has begun, quite pointedly, to replace it. Presumably, this is wherever the great mass of the population professes itself to be. So if, for example, the overwhelming majority of voters express a desire for a harder line on immigration, or for more support for traditional families, then those positions are on the common ground of politics and deserve to be respected.
By a remarkable coincidence, an ICM poll last week showed very considerable majorities saying that adopting both those things would make the Conservatives more likely to be elected. And this was not just the view of Tory voters, but of Labour and Liberal Democrat ones as well. On immigration, 60 per cent of Labour voters and 62 per cent of Lib Dem ones thought a tougher line would help the Tories. On helping “traditional families”, the figure in favour was 62 per cent for both Labour and the Lib Dems. So where exactly is the centre (or common) ground? If you insist that being tougher on immigration and being supportive of traditional families are “extreme” positions, then you are effectively repudiating the views of the great bulk of the population. Somehow, the notion of what constitutes reasonable (non-extreme) public opinion has moved on in a way that the self‑absorbed Tory myth-makers have rather missed. In their fixation with the attitudes of 1997, they have failed to notice that the centre has walked out from under them.
Times are much harder now than they were when the Tories first decided they needed a softer image. They seem not to have noticed that people are less outraged about spending cuts (which have general support) than they are by tax rises and increases in the cost of living. Voters who do not see themselves as remotely “extreme” are particularly aggrieved by the discrepancy between what the Tories say they believe in (aspiration, personal responsibility, marriage, etc) and the effect of their taxation policies (which penalise those things). Caught between a modernising credo that now looks as out of date as an avocado bathroom, and an electorate that hungers for forceful, decisive action, they try to split the difference and lose out all around.
Lynton Crosby, a man with a gift for understanding the real common ground, has arrived on the Tory strategy team and sent the ghost of modernisation into a caterwauling frenzy. He is said to be convinced that the Tory operation needs to focus on a few clear, consistent messages that will truly resonate with voters. I’ll say.
Remarkably enough, real people – as opposed to noisy activists – have sound
instincts about what the country needs. They deserve political leaders who
will actually address their concerns without collapsing into neurotic
self-doubt. Oddly, Mr Cameron, the most verbally adroit Tory leader in a
generation, may be the very man to succeed in this.
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