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Cameron’s mission to win back trust of the nation
Yorkshire Post - 30 January
2006
What on earth is David Cameron up to? Not even 100 days in the job and Tory policies are being jettisoned like cargo from a sinking ship. Patients’ passports – OUT. Opposition to university top-up fees? Stupid and short-sighted! Build more grammar schools? Daft! Support for identity cards? No way! The pace is relentless.
The Tory Holy of Holies: tax cuts. Well, maybe, if we can get the economy sorted out. But not a priority.
Out they go, not just the policies on which the party fought the election but the policies which sometimes seemed to originate in the very Tory genes. Whisper it ever so quietly. Could it be – perish the thought – a sort of de-Thatcherisation?
And as the policies go out so new personalities are signed up for the Tory make-over: Bob Geldorf (probably earning more hours of media coverage than the time he will ever put into advising the party!). Zac Goldsmith, son of the famous/notorious Jimmy Goldsmith and brother of the glamorous Jemima Khan, to fly the blue flag for the environment.
Good lord, the Tories can now count Madonna’s mother-in-law and the brother of the Hugh Grant’s current squeeze!
So what is happening? Well actually, three things. The first is a blitz on public opinion to convince the world that the party is changing. The second is an intense programme of generating new policy ideas. The third is a root-and-branch reform of the party’s organisation designed to re-conquer the technical mastery of the electoral battlefield.
The key to the blitz is the single word Trust. The Tories are a negative brand. If a set of policies are put in front of a focus group without a label they often get high rates of approval. As soon as they are identified as Tory the approval rating halves.
The reason is that the Tories are seen as selfish, in it for themselves, socially narrow, more ready to say what they are against than what they are for. In particular, they have suffered from being believed to be indifferent if not hostile to the two great state services: health and education.
Cameron is out to blast that perception out of existence. Hence the commitment to maintain an NHS free at the point of delivery and available to all. This is why the patient passport had to go- it looked like it was designed to help the better off escape the NHS. Grammar schools – too sectarian.
Connect with the new issues: the environment, poverty, development. And if this means lining up with Tony Blair against his own rebels or inviting comparison with the Blair of 1993 vintage so be it. We may not be proclaiming New Conservatives but Cameron is absolutely committed to portraying himself as a New Tory.
We have a huge mountain to climb, Cameron never ceases to repeat when he hears the muttering asking whether the party is still Conservative or is looking too like Labour. To take power after the next general election, even with the boundary changes, needs a swing of 6 per cent – and a swing of that size has been achieved only in 1945 and 1979 in the past 60 years. To break out of the “flat-lining” of around 33 per cent in the polls may give the party heart, but the real job is still to be done.
And the real job will only be done if the electorate believe the Tories have the intellectual substance to form a government. Hence the creation of six policy groups ranging widely over a set of issues rather than mirroring departmental frontiers. They cover social justice and social action; quality of life (including environment); Globalisation and world poverty; public service improvement; and national and international security.
Chaired by a combination of senior MPs and outside specialists they are intended to bring in a wide range of expertise. Cameron has promised that all the working papers will be posted on the groups’ web-sites. They are intended to come up with ideas which will collide, clash, overlap and confront. The groups, under the general direction of Oliver Letwin, have been given 18 months to come up with an “encyclopaedia” of ideas from which the manifesto policies will be drawn.
Cameron is aware of the charge that his drive to reposition the party risks closing off policy options, His response is that the party has got to earn the right to be listened to. Brilliant policies will only yield results if the electorate wants to hear them.
And it matters who is selling them. The party needs new candidates. The candidates list is frozen. A so-called “A list” of candidates “more representative of modern Britain” (in the slightly coy words of the Party Chairman Francis Maude – a fierce moderniser) will be in place by Easter ’07. They will be told to get stuck into local issues and identify with their communities, even at the expense of diluting their party identity. Pavement politics works. We are all local activists now!
The third leg of the strategy is to shake up Central Office. The computer-based election software is being updated to create what the party intends to be the most sophisticated tool-kit this side of the Atlantic. A permanent hit squad is being created to fight by-elections and targeted council elections. Campaign offices are to open in the big cities. The “target seat strategy” will be honed as brightly as a legionnaire’s sword.
The three actions go together. Persuade the electorate to listen; generate the ideas it will be invited to listen to; invest in the people to carry the message and the tools to maximise their effectiveness.
The key word in Cameron’s dynamic debut may be trust. But there is another word which the Tories are beginning to breathe, albeit ever so hesitantly. Power.
© Yorkshire Post
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