Status Anxiety: Nothing to write about

8 October 2011

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester and I must say it’s nice to be among friends. I mean the drunken hacks at the bar, obviously. This is a conference where we can drink with impunity because, let’s face it, there isn’t much for us to write about. The big story at all the party conferences is ‘splits’ and the reason both this conference and the Lib Dem conference have been so dull is because the split is between the two parties, not within them. This is one of the ancillary benefits of the coalition: the poles around which the government’s internal politics revolve are located in a safe place, quite unlike the previous administration.

Nearly all the Conservative party’s senior politicians have been effusive in their praise of the Liberal Democrats this week and that should be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, it’s self-interested. Lib Dem defectors are twice as likely to vote Labour as they are Conservative, so persuading them to return to the Lib Dem fold will benefit the Tories. It also makes the politicians in question look mature and magnanimous, totally unthreatened by their coalition partners. It’s the language of dominance.

But David Cameron’s affection for the coalition is at least partly genuine. It’s a huge comfort to know that his main rivals in the Cabinet are members of another party rather than this own. The fact that Chris Huhne is an insufferable prig who thinks he’s the smartest person in the room would be ten times more irritating if he was a card-carrying Tory, not least because Cameron would have to conceal his dislike for the sake of party unity. Contrast this with poor Tony Blair, having to contend with Gordon Brown sitting opposite him for ten years, face like thunder. The Lib Dems in the Cabinet are like in-laws rather than family members, only there because Cameron and Nick Clegg got married last year.

The presence of the coalition also enables the Prime Minister to manage his unruly backbenchers more easily. He can do what he wants — avoid an EU referendum, dump Andrew Lansley’s health reforms — while pretending it’s something he’s being forced to do to placate the Lib Dems. True, he’d be able to offer them more carrots in the form of ministerial positions if he was leading a Conservative government, but then he probably wouldn’t relish having David Davis in the Cabinet anyway. The need to preserve the coalition means he and his fellow modernisers can disguise their lofty disdain for the party’s vulgar right wing as political necessity.

To get a sense of how much more difficult life would be if there was a Conservative government, you only have to look at relations between No. 10 and City Hall. The Cameroons don’t deal well with internal opposition. Listening to Michael Gove’s speech on Tuesday, I wondered if his condemnation of absentee fathers — which brought hearty applause from the party faithful — was a veiled reference to the Mayor of London. Boris brings Cameron and some of his circle out in hives, not least because he wanders off message so frequently. No political leader enjoys insubordination in his ranks, but Cameron seems unusually intolerant of dissent.

Above all, though, the warmth between Nick Clegg and David Cameron seems real. They may no longer text each other every five minutes or play table tennis in the Cabinet Room quite so often, but it’s not just a marriage of convenience. Their friendship has endured. This could be precisely because they’re members of different parties. Their bromance has a Romeo and Juliet quality — it’s forbidden and therefore irresistible. No doubt they have plenty of disagreements over policy, but these squabbles are easier to manage because they’re not on the same team. Nick Clegg’s membership of the Lib Dems means he has permission to attack the Prime Minister. If he was the leader of a rival faction within the same party, by contrast, the rows would be much more rancorous.

Class comes into it, too. All politics is tribal, but to be too obviously partisan is a bit lower-class. Deep down, you get the sense that one of the reasons Cameron is a little uncomfortable with the party faithful is because he’s not much of an ideological warrior. He’s been brought up to be gracious and open-handed, a bridger of gaps rather than a digger of trenches. It suits him to be in a coalition, just as it suits Nick Clegg. For that reason and for all the others, it will endure.

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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Irascible Old Git

October 13th, 2011 10:30am Report this comment

How refreshing to learn, what with the continuing downturn in the economy, the banking crisis in Europe, the prospects for an all-out Middle East war and the current travails of the Secretary of State for Defence, that life for so-called journalists still revolves about chatting to each other in a bar.

Keep up the good work.

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