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Yorkshire Post - 1
December 2006
Of course he has been lucky- unbelievably lucky. Lucky to face a Labour government at the ragged end of the long Blair regime and lurching along the brink of civil war. Lucky that the Liberal Democrats failed totally to fill the void created by the long Tory leadership contest – and then had their own leadership melt-down. Lucky that the French and Dutch NO to the European constitution has totally sidelined Europe as a political issue.
But he has used his luck well. He knew he inherited not one problem but two: a political party; and its public reputation. He set out to change both. Hug a hoodie! Sledging with huskies! Identifying with the victims of anti-social behaviour on run-down estates; witnessing the anger and the agony of Darfur; challenging the relevance of the legacy of the two greatest post-war Party heroes – Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Standing up the CBI to visit troops in Iraq. This is political empathy and political brutalism rolled into one.
This has been about writing a new narrative for the party- associating it in the minds of the electorate with care about the environment, compassion on social issues, commitment to state-funded health care and education.
And if the message has to change, so do the messengers. The party’s candidates must mirror much more the diversity of the society they seek to represent. So he invents the A list – candidates specially selected to change the party’s sociology, with a special emphasis on women and people from ethnic minorities. It has worked in places- in the south rather than the north. In Yorkshire the local man is still seeing off the sometimes alien A- listers.
At the same time policy groups are getting the heavy work done: the thud, thud of delivery will start in the middle of this year – just as Gordon Brown takes over from Tony Blair.
Of course there are ironies: Eton is back at the top of the party. The grammar school generation – Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Michael Howard (William Hague was the party’s first-ever leader from a comprehensive school) – has been overthrown. The man telling the party that it must look like the rest of the population is the most patrician Conservative leader since Alec Douglas-Home.
So when David Cameron wakes up today on the first anniversary of becoming leader – and on Gordon Brown’s big day as he presents his “pre-budget report” (not a coincidence, I suspect) – he will feel well in his skin.
And however disenchanted die-hard letter writers to the Daily Telegraph may be the central fact is that Cameron has taken the Tories back into political contention. The party has at last come down from worshipping the idols on the political mountain tops into the valley where the electorate lives. More prosaically, the party is contesting the middle ground.
But it is still far from being one more heave from victory. It faces the Long March, not the Great Leap Forward. At some 38 per cent in the polls the Tories are still some six or seven points away from an election-winning score. But – perhaps more thanks to Labour incompetence and division than Tory inspiration – the party had edged ahead on the crucial twin terrains of health and education.
Big issues and – arguably – much tougher politics lie ahead. Cameron will face a voraciously hungry new Prime Minister determined to portray him as a light-weight – all muzak. Will the continuing rise in house prices and personal prosperity on the part of the employed outweigh the impact of cost rises for groups like pensioners? Or will the tougher environment for public spending after next year’s comprehensive spending review (and structural changes in the NHS) keep hospital closures and health “cuts” on the front page, creating new opportunities for Conservative campaigns in traditional Labour territory?
When will people make up their mind about Cameron? When does the narrative have to be filled out by serious policy options? As Labour gets its act together again can Cameron push the Tory appeal beyond its southern heartlands and into the North, Scotland and Wales (Labour may face falling behind the Nationalists in Scotland’s Parliamentary elections in May but there is precious little sign of Tory recovery north of Hadrian’s wall)?
And will the mutterings in the party remain just that- mutterings- when totemic issues like tax and spend have to be turned into policy? Having seen New Labour come to power on a pledge not to increase direct taxation, do the Tories really believe that they can only win office by pledging not to cut them!
David Cameron has no truck with the criticism that he has abandoned basic principles. He says that all his ideas are based on the simple idea of social responsibility to deliver social well-being. This means trusting professionals, carers, local government leaders and mobilising people to take charge of their communities. He calls it the “permissive state” – borrowing from the Victorian concept of the state as a promoter of individual responsibility. Gordon Brown believes in the active state: David Cameron places more faith in the active citizen.
That is what Cameron still needs to do – to integrate the new messages and the new policies, into the traditional Tory belief in a smaller state and individual aspiration. That is undoubtedly the battle Gordon Brown wants to fight. Sooner or later David Cameron will have to meet him head-on..
© Yorkshire Post
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