On Monday, we had a preview of the coming argument. David Cameron gave a speech declaring that EU membership ‘is not some national vanity; it is in our national interest’. This would have been relatively uncontroversial even during the bitterest period of John Major’s leadership. Now it’s news — because two senior Cabinet ministers, Michael Gove and Philip Hammond, have publicly declared that membership on the current terms is not in the national interest. Cameron’s speech also swam against an increasingly Eurosceptic tide of opinion in his party.

‘If he’s going to lead the “in” campaign,’ one senior Tory MP remarked to me, ‘I don’t think he can lead the party too.’ At least one loyalist fears that, if Cameron comes back from a Brussels renegotiation saying he’ll campaign to stay in, the chairman of the 1922 Committee will immediately receive enough letters to trigger a vote of no confidence.

The Labour leadership continue to hold out against a European referendum. It would dominate their time in office, and that prospect does not appeal. But even some members of Miliband’s circle know that the boil must be lanced at some point. They are canvassing opinion on calling for an instant in/out vote — which they could do by getting behind the forthcoming Tory private member’s bill. There would be a high-minded rationale: ‘ending the uncertainty’ about Britain’s position in Europe. The real motivation, however, would be to split the Tories between those who want a referendum now and those prepared to wait until after the renegotiation.

If Cameron wins the next election, he will have to begin the renegotiation immediately: he’ll only have 18 months to do it. But it is not clear what he’ll be able to bring back from Brussels. Those mandarins with the most experience of European treaty talks share Nigel Lawson’s view that significant concessions are simply not on offer.

The Tory leadership are sensitive on this point. They stress that rather than having a shopping list of powers they want back, their aim is to change the way the EU operates. William Hague has talked of a system to let national parliaments block European Commission proposals. The plan is fine as far as it goes. But it is not a veto for Westminster: several other European parliaments would have to take the same view. More sceptical Tory MPs are clear that this kind of change on its own would not be enough. And one of those working closely with Hague on the renegotiation strategy warns that a parliamentary veto system would only work if it could be applied retrospectively. What chance is there of other EU members agreeing to that?

Compounding Cameron’s problem is that he is most likely to be Prime Minister after 2015 as the head of another coalition. He’d probably still get his referendum one way or another. After all, as sources close to Nick Clegg are now keen to point out, the 2010 Liberal Democrat manifesto promised an in/out vote next time Britain’s relationship with Europe changes substantially. Coalition would, however, restrict Cameron’s room for manoeuvre. Clegg is said to be sceptical about Britain initiating a renegotiation: he doubts it would deliver very much. Intriguingly, one senior Liberal Democrat suggests that Clegg’s price for accepting the idea would be a commitment from Cameron to campaign for staying in. That would incense his fellow Tories. Most of Cameron’s MPs believe — along with the bulk of the Tory section of the Cabinet — that only a credible threat to quit can get Britain what it needs out of the renegotiation.

What should worry Cameron most is that his MPs appear to be moving away from him. He has been clear that if a deal can be reached, he’d like to lead the yes campaign — if he ends up campaigning to leave, it’ll be because he’s failed. But his ministers and MPs are becoming increasingly sceptical.

There is a set of circumstances in which one can imagine Cameron campaigning to get out: if the other EU states give him next to nothing. His willingness to use the veto in December 2011 showed that he’s not afraid to walk away from an unacceptable deal. It also demonstrated an awareness of what his party would wear. Before the final meeting of EU leaders that December night, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn quickly canvassed Tory opinion about the proposed treaty’s prospects in the Commons. He was told there would be a serious risk of defeat. At that point, the Prime Minister and his team realised they would have to veto.

However, such a situation is unlikely to be repeated. Angela Merkel is keen to keep her ‘naughty nephew’ in the European family. If she wins re-election this autumn, she’ll ensure that he has something to present to his public.

And if the Tories were to lose the next election? They’d have to make their decision even sooner, and without the luxury of a renegotiation. The EU question would dominate the post-election leadership contest. One prominent pro-European calls it ‘the blood on the carpet moment’. He suggests that the pro-Europeans could not accept an outist leader. But it is hard to imagine that those who want out of the EU would accept a leader committed to staying in.

The good news for Cameron is that Tory unity on Europe will probably hold until 2015; there are only a handful of his MPs who can’t sign up to his strategy of renegotiation followed by a referendum. But after that, the Tories will not be able to put off the big choice much longer. Whichever way it goes, there’ll be those who can’t accept the decision. EU membership will have split the Tories just as the Corn Laws did.

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When news first broke of Patrick Mercer’s troubles, the Cameroons could barely conceal their schadenfreude. They were not going to mourn the political demise of Cameron’s most vituperative backbench critic. But the headlines were still about Tory sleaze. Labour began demanding to know why the government had abandoned plans for a statutory register of lobbyists. The government, to the alarm of Tory MPs, was being pushed on to the back foot again.

Then, late on Monday afternoon, came details of the proposed lobbying bill. To Westminster’s surprise, it included a clampdown on the trade unions. There were measures to control their spending in the year prior to an election and to investigate the accuracy of their membership lists. It was a brazen attempt to turn this crisis to the coalition parties’ political advantage.

The Labour leadership was indignant, complaining that these measures are normally taken forward on a cross-party basis. But the ploy had worked. Labour was now on the defensive, trying to explain away its opposition to change. This act of low politics so cheered the Tory troops because of how unexpected it was. David Cameron’s No. 10, to their frustration, is a surprisingly unpolitical place. Even loyalist Cabinet ministers privately vent about ‘the complete lack of political drive in Downing Street’. Few people there wake up every morning thinking about how they will do over the Labour party today. The Tory hope is that this bit of crude-but-effective ju-jitsu is a sign that Downing Street has realised it has to be more political.

Intriguingly, Nick Clegg is on board for this effort to curb the unions’ political influence. I understand that these measures were almost agreed for the Queen’s Speech but there was a feeling that more work was needed on the detail. This crisis has given the bill the impetus it needed. Despite No. 10’s fear that Clegg is becoming an increasingly unreliable legislative partner, they’re convinced that he’ll stay the course on this. Their confidence is rooted in the personal vilification that the unions have heaped upon him. For months, whenever Clegg returned to Sheffield and his constituency he was met by a Unison poster attacking him as ‘Cleggzilla’. ‘If you’re on the receiving end of that,’ says a senior No. 10 figure, ‘you’re all too aware of union power. That pain is very real.’

There’s political life in the coalition yet, then. But it doesn’t have the monopoly on election planning. Ed Balls and Ed Miliband’s interventions this week were part of a concerted effort to win back some credibility for Labour on its two weakest issues, economic competence and welfare. The Labour leadership are acutely aware that at the next election the Tories will present them as a bunch of spendthrifts. By sacrificing the winter fuel payment of wealthier pensioners to austerity, they mean to show that Labour understands that the years of plenty are behind us.

That move was also designed to cause Cameron a particular problem. During the election debates, he promised to protect pensioner benefits. He has kept to this commitment despite intense pressure from his coalition partners — and his Welfare Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith — to abandon it. The expectation in Whitehall is that the pledge will be quietly dropped at the next election. But Labour are much struck by polling which shows that the Tories have lost more votes to Ukip among the over-60s than any other group: Ukip has 23 per cent of the grey vote. They calculate that if Cameron were to match their policy, he would exacerbate this problem. And if he doesn’t, Labour can point to at least one area where their appetite for the hard choices of fiscal rectitude is greater than Cameron’s.

But buried beneath Balls’s announcement there was an even more significant shift. Labour is moving away from its Keynesian critique of the coalition’s deficit reduction plan; hence Balls’s strong hint that Labour will match the day-to-day spending plans for each department. Instead, it intends to differentiate itself with plans for a large programme of infrastructure spending. Miliband wants the choice at the next election to be one between the future and the past.

But the Tory leadership believes that Labour’s past remains its Achilles’ heel. They are delighted by Balls’s refusal to concede that Labour spent too much, because  it helps them paint him as someone who would make exactly the same mistakes all over again.

Miliband’s challenge on welfare is to connect with a public that feels the benefits system is being exploited. In this downturn, in a break from the historical norm, public attitudes to welfare have hardened. Miliband, not a natural populist, has so far not had any truck with this new mood. He’s refused to use the phrase ‘benefit cheat’ and won’t back the government’s £26,000 a year benefits cap despite knowing how popular it is. His brains trust hope that by talking about a structural cap in welfare spending, he can neutralise the potency of the Tory charge that it isn’t fair that some families can claim more in benefits than the average family earns in a year. I doubt it.

The next election is shaping up to be a thoroughly traditional affair. The Tories will depict Labour as reckless spenders who are in the pockets of the unions. Labour, for their part, will paint the Tories as the party of the rich. But the prize will go to the party that can promote its own ideas as well as attacking its opponents’.

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It is too early to say whether Universal Credit (which rolls six benefits into one monthly payment) will sink or swim. Its first pilots launched in April, and Whitehall insiders insist that the ‘amber/red’ warning from the MPA is hardly a surprise when you consider quite how ambitious this reform is. It was always unlikely to get a green light.

But there is an additional question about whether the government machine really is capable of delivering such ambitious policies at the moment. If Universal Credit is a flop, then it will prove our current Whitehall set-up is failing. But if it succeeds, it will be no thanks to the civil service either.

Three years into the coalition, every minister bears scars on their back from trying to push through even the smallest of changes. Michael Gove owes his success in reforming schools not to the alacrity shown by his department in signing up to his agenda, but to a superstructure of advisers that he brought in to operate above the existing officials. At the other end of the scale, Grant Shapps recently succeeded, after an impressive battle, in persuading his officials to ‘retweet’ some of his own Twitter comments about government programmes. The wheels of the Whitehall machine need plenty of oil before they start turning.

The Work and Pensions department is famed in Westminster for having particularly slow and creaky wheels. One loyal Cabinet colleague of Iain Duncan Smith says the Secretary of State was ‘extremely badly let down’ by his officials on the ‘shockingly bad’ set-up of Universal Credit.

In December the department’s chief information officer, Philip Langsdale, died suddenly. David Pitchford, who runs the Major Projects Authority, took over the Credit’s implementation for three months. Duncan Smith could have relied on his permanent secretary Robert Devereux, but he is rumoured to be on his way out, described by one Whitehall source as a ‘policy wonk, not a delivery person’.

Pitchford, by contrast, has worked as chief executive on a number of big projects, including the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games. His time in the department was vital for the welfare reform programme. It meant the pilots could go ahead this April, albeit in a less ambitious form than originally planned. So once again, it takes outsiders, not civil servants, to implement reform.

Other ministers have developed their own strategies for coping with the civil service. One found himself overwhelmed by pre-meeting briefings given by officials who assumed that a minister would need someone to explain to them what a policy was before making a decision about it. He wrestled back control of his diary from officials, and banned the briefings. ‘The system works to control you, and you have to control the system,’ says this victorious minister.

In some cases, the problem is as much that the officials don’t realise that they are ill equipped, explains one senior minister. In other cases, it’s that the turnover of civil servants means no one sees the project through till the end. ‘We have got to end the situation where no one feels responsible for the final outcome of a major project,’ says Bernard Jenkin, chair of the Public Administration select committee, which scrutinises Whitehall. ‘In the private sector, it is not uncommon for individuals to make a 20-year project the be-all-and-end-all of their entire career. Compare that to the civil service.’

Some suspect that when a secretary of state sets out on a big project, permanent secretaries over-promise and fail to highlight problems. Ironically, the MPA report that caused such a fuss is also an example of good civil service reform: it means that everybody involved can confess when things aren’t going according to plan, rather than cover up. Others feel the struggle over Duncan Smith’s reforms is a sign that there needs to be a political upper tier overseeing them, either through political appointments to the civil service, or more special advisers.

One final reason for the precarious state of Universal Credit is that there has been distinct reluctance on the part of those at the top to support it. The Spectator reported in September that Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood was letting it be known that he was ‘sceptical’ about Duncan Smith’s mission. He wasn’t the only one. Duncan Smith has had to do battle with George Osborne as well, both over the extra cost of the project and the values underpinning it. In his biography of the Chancellor, Janan Ganesh reported that Osborne was suspicious that the Christian sense of mission behind the plan might blind those advocating it to whether it would really work. But those close to the Work and Pensions Secretary believe he has since managed to make the case to the Treasury for this reform. ‘Iain has taken George with him and we do have the support of George now on universal credit,’ says a source close to the minister. Indeed, Osborne seemed happy to praise the Credit in a speech on welfare in April.

Ministers were at one stage wary of talking about Universal Credit, but perhaps it is gaining a few more friends now. It needs them. The struggle so far might have been to persuade colleagues and officials that this is a reform worth fighting for. But now the fighting has begun, and the project is still expected to expand to new claimants in October. And that will need the Whitehall machine to fire on all cylinders, or O’Rourke will be right all over again.

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Three weeks later, he is undergoing the most profound crisis of his leadership so far. Tory unity has evaporated over Europe, gay marriage and whether the top brass think the membership are ‘loons’. All the pressure on Labour has lifted. The story is Tory divisions again: nearly every news programme features two Tory MPs arguing with each other. The situation, as one Tory cabinet minister nervously puts it, ‘has more than a hint of the John Majors’.

There is an industrial quantity of blame to go round. One No. 10 source concedes that their operation has been ‘arrogant and incompetent’. Cameron cancelled two political cabinets in a row — so there was no collective consultation with his senior colleagues as the fights raged over Europe and gay marriage. During this time he also failed to meet any member of the 1922 Executive, the MPs elected by Tory backbenchers to represent them. Any leader who cuts himself off from his party in these circumstances is foolhardy, to say the least.

Then there is the ‘swivel-eyed’ saga. Whether or not party chairman Andrew Feldman actually used the words remains the subject of intense dispute. But the accusation and the fallout from it highlight several things that are wrong with the way that Cameron does politics. The alleged remark caused such a stir because it seemed to fit the disdainful attitude that too many Cameroons take towards their party; that the foot soldiers fail to appreciate what good leaders they have. As one senior backbencher puts it, the leadership ‘blames other people for failing to be inspired by them, rather than themselves’.

Compounding the problem is the narrowness of the clique around Cameron. Andrew Feldman might be an able fundraiser but he is the joint chairman of the Tory party because he is friends with the Prime Minister. They played tennis together for their Oxford college, Brasenose. Cameron appears unwilling to trust anyone he met after his first months as leader of the opposition. And so his inner circle fails to draw on all the Tory talents.

The other fault that the saga revealed is that the No. 10 operation is simply not nimble enough. The story broke in Saturday’s papers. By Monday’s, Ukip had a full-page ad in the Daily Telegraph calling on disaffected Tories to switch sides. But it took until late on Monday afternoon for Cameron to send a bland email of reassurance to party members. If the leadership wanted to manage this crisis proactively, that email should have gone out on Saturday, straight after Feldman’s denial. If Cameron wanted to show that he really did value the party’s grass roots, he should have written by hand to every Tory association chairman — that would have had far more of a impact than a mass email.

But it would be unfair to blame No. 10 alone. There’s a small but growing band of backbenchers whose personal hatred of Cameron means that they will do almost anything to harm him, regardless of the effect on  the party. There can be no appeasing these people. But intelligent management could split them off from the party’s mainstream.

More worrying for No. 10 is the willingness of senior figures to fan the flames. It is hard to overstate how angry some of Cameron’s confidants are with Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary. They feel that his recent pronouncements on the EU, gay marriage and the need for welfare cuts are all designed to position him as a potential answer to the question, ‘If not Cameron, who?’ Bastards, the term John Major applied to his cabinet troublemakers, is mild compared with what the Cameroons say about Hammond.

There is also no doubt that politics has become more difficult. The Tory party used to believe in loyalty. But now those MPs who rebel can expect to be lauded when they return to their constituency associations. The media environment has also become more febrile. As newspapers struggle for financial stability, they have become ever more aggressive. According to one Tory who has watched both Major and Cameron operate at close quarters, ‘Cameron would have breezed the 1990s.’

Where all the Tory discontent will lead remains to be seen. A confidence vote on Cameron’s leadership is becoming a more substantial prospect. It would still be a surprise, but, as one senior figure notes, ‘If the Cameron inner circle was trying to build the pressure up for that, they couldn’t be doing a better job.’

The situation facing Cameron, though, is different in two crucial respects from the one Major faced. First, there has been no Black Wednesday. However far George Osborne has veered from his original deficit reduction plan, he has not been forced to admit that his economic strategy was wrong. So the Tories have a good chance of claiming credit for an economic recovery. Government insiders are convinced that the next two years will see steady, if unspectacular, growth. They believe that this will make politics far less scratchy and give them a substantial lead over Labour on the economy.

Second, there’s no Tony Blair on the scene today to snap at prime ministerial heels. In terms of pure political skills, no one in this parliament comes close. But Blair was also prepared to win by closing down the right’s potential advantages. In the 1997 manifesto, he promised to keep to Tory spending plans for the first two years of a Labour government, not to raise the basic or higher rate of income tax and to hold a referendum before Britain joined the single currency. Ed Miliband, by contrast, doesn’t want to match Tory pledges on spending, welfare and EU referendums. He has set himself the far more difficult task of winning a mandate to govern in a distinctively Labour fashion.

The Tories need not despair. Defeat is not inevitable. But if the leadership and the Tory party cannot find a way to work together, it will soon become so.

The post Cameron is nearing crisis point appeared first on The Spectator.

The other conversation is more profound. It is about why close to one in four of those who bothered to do their democratic duty last week voted Ukip. The rise of any new party is a statement of dissatisfaction with the existing establishment. But what is striking about Ukip is the diversity of its appeal. The fact that it secured more second placess than any other party last Thursday shows that it is far more than just a repository for Tebbitites disillusioned with the Tory modernising project. It is succeeding in drawing support from ex-Tory and Labour voters. It reflects disillusionment not just with one party but with all parties.

Part of what lies behind Ukip’s rise is the extent to which the consensus in Westminster doesn’t match the consensus in the country. International development is, perhaps, the most potent example. All three main parties are committed to Britain increasing its aid budget to 0.7 per cent of gross national income. But the public view is quite the opposite. One minister complains that most of his constituents would think it absurd to cut the army’s budget while increasing aid. But, he claims, if he said that in Westminster, he’d be regarded as a ‘maverick’. This minister argues that what the political class fails to understand is that many of Ukip’s policies ‘aren’t fringe positions. They’re only fringe positions in the Westminster Village.’

Nigel Farage plays up to this idea, presenting himself as the tribune of common sense. He is aided in this task by the reluctance of other political leaders to paint in primary colours. The Farage agenda might, in places, be contradictory. But it is clear he wants to quit the EU and the ECHR, lower taxes, scrap green subsidies, bring back grammar schools and increase defence spending.

There are no caveats here. Their absence is the luxury afforded to a party that’ll never have to put its ideas into practice. But Ukip’s platform does stand in stark contrast to what one minister calls ‘the mini-managerialism’ of the three main parties. The other striking thing about Farage is his self-confidence. He isn’t apologetic about who he is or what he believes. Travel with Farage and he goes first-class with no attempt to pretend that he’d rather be in standard. One can’t imagine him posing for snaps designed to show how modest his holiday is. He doesn’t appear to feel the need to try to demonstrate ‘ordinariness’ that so many politicians do. It seems to come naturally to him.

To describe Farage as unspun would be wrong. He talks about the need for ‘clever marketing, simple, straightforward messages that resonate and appeal and hit.’ But he has grasped that spin now does the opposite of what it was invented to do. It was meant to improve politicians’ communication with the public, to cut out the barriers to people understanding them. But the uniform language and dress of the political class are now a turn-off. It is no coincidence that the politicians most often called by their first names are those who disdain the rules of political PR. Boris Johnson is the most famous example, but Vince Cable is another. One thing that makes him stand out is his age. Part of the case for Cable, who has just turned 70, as Liberal Democrat leader is that in the TV debates his age would instantly set him apart from Cameron and Miliband.

Confidants of the party leaders complain about comparisons with these political showmen. They argue that the media wouldn’t allow the Prime Minister or leader of the opposition to get away with doing what Boris does, let alone Farage. They are at least partly right. But these leaders would, I suspect, earn some respect if they stopped pretending to have a keen interest in things they are in reality too busy to pay much attention to.

Cameron has long had form on this front. In the early 1990s, when he worked at Conservative Central Office, one of his specialisms was giving ministers pass notes on that week’s pop culture before they went on Question Time.

But today Cameron’s greatest challenge is showing that he understands the new world in which we are living. He defined himself so strongly as a politician for the good times — ‘let sunshine win the day’, ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’ etc — that he has struggled to adjust to the grittier, post-crash world.

What is keeping spirits up in No. 10, however, is Labour’s vulnerability. It failed to break 30 per cent in the county council elections; a pretty poor result for the principal opposition party when the other two main parties are in coalition with each other.

Last week, Lynton Crosby told the Tories’ political cabinet how the party would undermine Labour between now and the next election. The Australian strategist explained that the two main lines of attack were going to be that Labour hasn’t changed — ‘same old Labour’ — and that Miliband is weak. It was testament to Crosby’s dominance over the party machine that no Cabinet minister queried his analysis. I understand that the precise phrase ‘same old Labour’ was Cameron’s suggestion.

Persuading the public that Labour can’t be trusted with office again is necessary but not sufficient. To achieve victory, the Tories must connect with the electorate in a way that they are currently not. That means Cameron finding a role for Boris; he’d be well suited to being the chief Cameron surrogate.

Those around Cameron fret about whether Boris can be trusted or not. But the presence of Crosby, the man who helped get Boris get elected in London twice, should ensure his good behaviour. Then there is the other question the Cameroons have to ask themselves: is there a Tory better suited to reaching those parts of the electorate that Farage can but the Tory leadership can’t? The answer should tell them that they need Boris on board for the campaign.

The post The Tories need their own Nigel Farage appeared first on The Spectator.

The party changed leaders four times in the eight years between 1997 and 2005. In these opposition ‘wilderness’ years, changing a leader was the closest to power that Conservative MPs came. Leadership plotting gave an odd sense of purpose to their presence at Westminster.

In this period, few Conservatives could claim that they were blameless: few had been loyal to every leader. Those who had been complicit in the toppling of Margaret Thatcher, a three-time election winner, could hardly preach. But the situation became even more complicated when a Maastricht rebel became leader in 2001. Iain Duncan Smith’s ascent so offended some former whips, normally the guardians of party discipline, that they started to plot against him almost on principle: as a former rebel, they argued Duncan Smith was not owed loyalty.

At the turn of this year, David Cameron was in danger of becoming the latest leader to fall victim to the mutinous nature of the Conservative tribe. His backbenchers were becoming ever more obstreperous and a section of the party was becoming intoxicated by talk of leadership challenges.

First, there was the bizarre Adam Afriyie plot. This never concerned those closest to Cameron much. They viewed the idea of Afriyie as leader as simply too preposterous to catch on and predicted that he wouldn’t survive a serious TV interview. They were right; his encounter with Andrew Neil put a probably irreparable dent in his ambitions.

Then it was Theresa May’s turn. After the Home Secretary made right-wingers swoon with a wide-ranging speech about what the Conservatives should do to win the next election, some of the Cameroons looked unsettled. One took to complaining viciously about the ‘Mayniacs’ around her.

That all seems a long time ago. The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought the parliamentary party together again. One MP remarks: ‘It has reminded us of what we reap when we get rid of a leader.’ But Cameron has also taken the chance to show his MPs that he is one of them.

This is something that Cameron has been surprisingly bad at doing. Unlike Thatcher, he doesn’t, as a rule, write notes to colleagues complimenting them on their speeches. He is not a natural backslapper. One backbencher complains, ‘he’s not good at touching people’. He is also awful at realising that people remember every conversation they have with the leader. Chance encounters with his MPs might not mean much to him, but they mean an awful lot to those lower down the food chain which makes his sometimes off-hand manner particularly problematic.

Cameron, though, has gone against type these past few weeks. Every Conservative MP who spoke in the Thatcher debate has received a handwritten note from the Prime Minister thanking them for their contribution. The night of that debate he led a group of Conservative MPs to a Commons bar for a pint. Even those Conservative MPs who are normally critical of him concede that Cameron has had — as one of them says — ‘a very good couple of weeks’. In No. 10, they hope that this marks a turning-point in Cameron’s relationship with his MPs. One says, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day. But for the first time, I think, we have a proper, systematic way of engaging with the party.’ Conservative MPs are crediting John Hayes, the garrulous minister who has recently started in No. 10 as a senior parliamentary adviser, with Cameron’s greater attentiveness to his party’s feelings.

One other thing cheering Conservative MPs is the presence of Lynton Crosby at the top table. To those who worry that the leadership is too metropolitan and doesn’t understand the grittier issues, the tough Australian is immensely reassuring. It has given some of those who had despaired of Cameron, a chance to clamber back on board.

But there are already doubts about how long this mood of unity can last. As one ministerial bag-carrier says, ‘The question is, are we like one of those families that come together for Christmas, only to drift apart again straight after?’ The first test will be the county council elections in May. The Conservatives are braced for loses, the last time these seats were contested was in 2009, when they were comfortably ahead in the polls. But their MPs are hopeful that the results won’t be as bad as feared. One source remarks, ‘The results won’t be great. But if our lot keep their nerve, it’ll be a one-day story.’

But if they don’t hold their nerve, the Conservatives will be plunged back to where they were before. This would be a double disaster for them because Labour unity has been built, in large part, on Tory disunity. The Labour party has been kept together by a sense that they are heading back to power. If a united Conservative party continues to narrow the poll gap, more and more Labour MPs will begin to air their concerns about Labour’s direction of travel.

Labour is also reaping the consequences of ejecting its own three-time election winner. The Blairites are no longer as tightly organised as they once were. But they are becoming more bitter about Blair’s ejection from office, not less, and more prepared to speak their minds. Ed Miliband’s regular distancing of himself from some of New Labour’s signature policies is particularly galling to them.

The next election is only two years away. If the Conservatives have rediscovered their secret weapon, then victory could be theirs. But if they have not, then they are in for another period of rapid leadership changes.

The post A rare mood of unity descends on the Tories appeared first on The Spectator.

Margaret Thatcher may have been, as the bien-pensants put it, divisive. But she had her partisans as well as her detractors. It often seems like modern politicians only have the latter. Indeed, when the electorate of 2013 were asked what phrases they associated with Thatcher they replied ‘determined’, ‘ruthless’ and ‘stands up for Britain’.

Today, the politicians who prosper are the ones who go out of their way not to be like politicians. One political fixer who has sat through endless focus groups in the last two years calls this the Boris Johnson effect. He notes that ‘being caught on a zip-wire should be disastrous. But at the moment anything that marks you out as not another politician is helpful.’ Nigel Farage is clearly channelling this advice. He canvasses in outfits that would give a Tory spin doctor a heart attack, tweeds and cords or City pinstripes, and takes every opportunity to imbibe in public; he’s filmed with a half-empty pint in UKIP’s latest party political broadcast. You can turn the sound off and the message is still clear: I’m not like the others. This approach appears to be working; a poll this week has him as Britain’s least unpopular party leader.

In some respects, the obloquy heaped upon David Cameron and Ed Miliband is odd. Both of them are in politics for the ‘right reasons’, Cameron out of a sense of public service and Miliband because of ideological conviction. Not even the merest whiff of financial impropriety attaches to either man. Indeed, for much of their careers they’ve been the junior earner in their families. They are both uxorious, family men.

But living standards are falling and whenever that happens politics becomes scratchy. Voters overwhelmingly want change but aren’t convinced that either Cameron or Miliband can bring it about. Instead, they see a crisis without end. Tory Ministers have been urged to stop talking about light at the end of the tunnel because the party’s research shows that this only irritates the public because they don’t think it is true.

Those close to Miliband believe that this public discontent provides him with his opening. In circumstances such as these, the electorate might be prepared to go for the less conventionally attractive politician.

Miliband is not an establishment figure; he would have been ill-suited to leading Labour before 1997 when the aim was to reassure swing voters that they were not too left wing. Equally, he is not a natural on the television sofa. It is hard to imagine him profiting at a time of easy prosperity. But, the argument goes, the public may well turn to him at a time when they want a fundamentally different direction for the county.

The Labour leader likes to claim that he, like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, is the politician who is prepared to recast the consensus. He believes that the orthodoxies that have governed Britain these past 30 years need to be replaced and that he is the man to do it. To some in the Labour party, this is wilful thinking. At an event this week, Peter Mandelson read out part of Miliband’s Thatcher tribute before archly remarking, to audience laughter, that ‘he certainly sets himself a high bar’. Miliband’s New Labour critics accuse him of falling into the trap of believing that the electorate has moved to where he wants them to be.

Tony Blair’s article for the New Statesman last week has brought some of these divisions into the open. Some of those close to Miliband try to dismiss the entire notion of a row. One complained bitterly to me that ‘banality has become controversial’. They point to the fact that the former Prime Minister sent an advance copy of the article to Miliband’s office as proof that it wasn’t intended as a destablising act.

Those who have spoken to Blair recently, though, say that there is a fundamental difference between the two men. Blair believes that Labour were not in a bad place electorally in the early years of the last parliament. This analysis has it that the problem at the last election was the front man, Gordon Brown, and some of his policies, not the New Labour brand. This was what lay behind Blair’s recent statement that ‘if I’d had a fourth election, I would have given Cameron a run for his money… I’m not saying I would have won, but it would have been tighter than it was.’

Miliband doesn’t share this view. His opinion is that fundamental problems with Labour’s position were apparent by 2005 and with or without Gordon Brown, Labour would have struggled. This explains Miliband’s desire to move on from New Labour to One Nation Labour. He wants to go back to the drawing board on immigration, something that infuriates Blair who has become even more committed to his creed of openness since leaving office. Miliband’s circle are also explicit that they want a far bigger change in the way the economy is run than Blair ever contemplated. While the candle of Blairite public service reform is now kept alive by the coalition not his own party.

So, will 2015 be a sea-change election? No. 10 is scornful of the idea of a dramatic shift to the left. They claim that Miliband is out of touch with changing public attitudes to welfare. They also point out that enthusiasm for Labour is not something you come across on the doorstep.

There’s been no dramatic surge in support for Labour. Its lead, for this point in the parliament, is not spectacular. But as one Tory MP fretted to me this week, it doesn’t need to be. It is psephologically possible for Labour to win the next election without taking a vote off the Tories. Coalition, and the defection of the left of the Liberal Democrats, has increased the Labour base to 35 per cent, which was enough to give it a majority in 2005.

Much of the anti-politics sentiment comes from a sense that politicians are impotent in the face of today’s economic challenges. If, as the Treasury believes it will, the economy starts to recover from the autumn, then the voters might have something more positive to say about Cameron. But if it doesn’t, then Miliband will have a great chance to prove his internal critics wrong.

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Thatcher understood that it was not enough for a Conservative government to  seek to conserve things. In a world in which change is inevitable and the Labour party, the academic establishment and the self-appointed representatives of civil society are all doing their best to move the country to the left, Conservatives have to do more than to try and hold the line.  As she warned in her 1982 conference speech (arguably her best), ‘Where the left stood yesterday the centre stands today.’ This makes it imperative that, in government, the Tories move the centre to the right.

Thatcher grasped that, while Karl Marx’s political economy is wrong, there is something to be taken from his understanding of how politics works. Council house sales created a new class of property owners, privatisation a new private-sector workforce, and economic and regulatory reform empowered the entrepreneur. Cameron is, in places, trying to do something similar.

His deficit reduction plan is based around shrinking the public sector and expanding the private sector. His Chancellor and chief political strategist, George Osborne, is constantly looking for new ways to create Tory voters. But they have yet to come up with anything as dramatic or as effective as Thatcherism. Their ‘invitation to join the government of Britain’ didn’t have anywhere near the same appeal as the chance to buy your own home.

A second lesson from Thatcher for today’s Tories is that they must be the anti-establishment party. She understood that deference was dead and that a Tory party that was seen as the political wing of the elite would not win elections. She presented the Tories as the little man’s ally against big government. Even as Prime Minister, she would criticise the government and the bureaucracy, something that Steve Hilton tried and failed to persuade Cameron to do. She also rejected the cosy corporatist stitch-ups that Edward Heath had been so attracted to.

Cameron finds it harder to portray himself as an insurgent. Straight after he paid tribute to Thatcher on Monday night for ‘how she fought her way’ to power with ‘the odds stacked against her’, a close friend of his ruefully remarked that ‘it is the disadvantage of his class that he’ll never be able to say that about himself’.

His background is as establishment as they come. But his bigger problem is that he can also have a rather establishment mindset, and many of those around him share his privileged perspective. There are, to adapt Harold Macmillan, too many Old Etonians and too few Old Estonians in Cameron’s No. 10. In opposition, I remember one of his closest aides saying ‘David and Ed [Llewellyn, his chief of staff] believe that once the right people are holding the red boxes again everything will be all right.’ Too much of that attitude has been carried into government.

Thatcher spoke instinctively of ‘our people’. This term was a broader one than her critics, and some of her allies, like to admit. It described those who were meant to benefit from her reforms, many of whom were people who would not have voted Tory before.

In 2010, David Cameron didn’t have a ‘people’. Rather, he tried to be a unifying national figure. But if you are for everybody, you are ultimately for nobody. Partly out of necessity, he is trying to rectify this error. The government is now, in a phrase that Cameron and Osborne have taken to using at every opportunity, for ‘hard-working people’. This, though, needs to be more than a sound-bite. It must be the golden thread running through all their policies.

An argument will rage in the Tory party about who Thatcher’s true heirs are. This is not a debate that the modernisers should shrink from: they have a good claim to this inheritance. It is more than a coincidence that three of the most Thatcherite things that this coalition government is doing are being pushed through by the three most prominent modernisers. Michael Gove is reforming education in the way that Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph would have liked to have done. Francis Maude, who served under her as a minister, is pursuing thrift and efficiency across government from his perch at the Cabinet Office. And Nick Boles, as planning minister, is trying to enact structural changes to the planning system which will ensure that Britain remains a property-owning democracy. These agendas are all characterised by a very Thatcherite impatience with the established order and a willingness to challenge entrenched interests.

It is testament to Margaret Thatcher that the 2010 intake was the most Thatcherite set of Tories yet elected. It is also, appropriately,  the most socially diverse. I suspect that it is from this group that Britain’s next Thatcheresque prime minister will come. That may be her final triumph.

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Toward the end of his time in No. 10, Steve Hilton would sit in policy meetings and ask, ‘But is it transformative?’ These words, delivered with a flick of the hand to illustrate a thought coming out of his head, attracted much mockery from jaded civil servants. But what Hilton understood was that prime ministers have a limited supply of time and political capital. To leave a lasting impression, they have to concentrate not on little changes but big ones.

Michael Gove, a close friend of both Hilton and Cameron, used to goad Gordon Brown by emphasising the distinction between the two types of PMs: ‘transformative’ ones, who marked the beginning of an era, and ‘fag-end’ ones. Hilton’s radical impatience has now taken him to California. On the way out, he griped to friends that he wasn’t sure whether Cameron was prepared to do what it takes to really change things.

Cameron has been prepared to jettison (or soften) much of the policy he espoused in the 2005 Tory leadership contest. Then, he chided those who focused on gross domestic product alone: we should aspire to general well-being (GWB). Cameron now monitors the GDP figures as nervously as any prime minister, hoping to find in them a vindication of his economic strategy. His sleigh rides with huskies have been replaced by bold declarations about ensuring the cheapest energy bills for every customer. His much-ridiculed Big Society is still part of the vocabulary, but is reserved for defending the government from attack by churches or charities.

Most of these shifts have been forced on Cameron by circumstance. He was preparing to be Prime Minister in an age where he believed (as Oliver Letwin put it) that politics had moved from being econo-centric to socio-centric. But two years into his project, the financial crisis showed just how mistaken that assumption was.

Two things from the pre-crash Cameron message have survived: his focus on the NHS and his commitment to gay marriage. The Prime Minister may be prepared to U-turn on many issues (too many, according to some of his closest Cabinet allies) but on these two he is immovable. It is for this reason that there’s no chance of the Chancellor cutting NHS spending in the June spending review, even as other department’s budgets are cut again.

Talk to Cameron’s allies about what his legacy might be, and they make two points. First, he is only a third of the way through what he hopes will be a ten-year stretch in Downing Street. Second, the government is making lasting changes to education and welfare. But, as Cameron has the humility to acknowledge, these reforms aren’t his reforms. Rather, they are Michael Gove’s and Iain Duncan Smith’s.

To his supporters, this is a welcome return to the days when prime ministers didn’t feel the need to be ‘personally associated’ with everything that their administrations did. Instead they appointed the right people and let them get on with it. It’s a rejection of Tony Blair’s presidential model. But the problem is that the Tories intend to fight a presidential-style campaign at the next election. They wish to ask only one question: who do you want as leader — David Cameron or Ed Miliband?

This makes the question of Cameron’s legacy all the more important. He needs to define what he is for. His deputy is clear about his aim: to make the Liberal Democrats a party of government, and coalitions the norm in Britain. So far, Nick Clegg is not doing badly. His MPs and his party have taken to office more easily than most (including Clegg himself) expected. The coalition has also proved surprisingly stable. At the next election, it will be harder to suggest that a hung parliament leads to chaos.

But the real tests of Clegg’s success will come at the next election and in its aftermath. In many ways, Liberal Democrat unity was not fully tested in May 2010 because it was clear that the party could not prop up a defeated Gordon Brown even if it wanted to. The options were Cameron, or opposition. But in 2015, there will be a genuine choice of partners. This will place a far greater stress on the Liberal Democrats. They will have to make an active choice about whether they would like to govern in a centre-left or centre-right coalition.

Ed Miliband is the leader who is keenest to become one of Gove’s ‘transformative’ PMs. He likes to talk of ‘new assumptions’, a ‘new economy’ and a ‘new society’. But so far, he has consciously avoided giving the country much detail on how these changes would be achieved. We are promised more concrete policies by the next Labour conference. But he is still some way off passing what he himself calls ‘the change test’, showing voters that his government really would be different from what has gone before.

Before the 1992 election, Neil Kinnock urged voters to consign John Major to a footnote in the history books. Cameron avoided that fate on day one; he will go down as the first postwar coalition PM. But ironically, history may remember him best for something that has always interested him less than it does his party: Europe. His pledge to renegotiate Britain’s terms of membership of the European Union and then put them to a referendum will be the defining commitment of his second term. If he has one.

Even if he is not Prime Minister after 2015, he can claim to have shaped British politics insofar as the other parties are preparing to copy his stance. The Liberal Democrat leadership is already readying its own referendum commitment. It’s an achievement; but not, one suspects, what he would like to be in the history curriculum for. But there is still time. When Mr Cameron returns from holiday and walks past his re-hung predecessors, he may consider what he’d like his legacy to be.

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Part of the problem is that few Tories have anything to compare their current mood with. After 13 years in opposition, only a handful of them have been in government before, let alone in the mid-term doldrums.

When I put this argument to one veteran of the Thatcher years, he delighted in pointing out that there was at least one person in No. 10 who knew what mid-term was like under Thatcher. Patrick Rock is Cameron’s policy fixer, having worked with him as a special adviser to Michael Howard in the Major years. But before that, he was a mid-term Tory by-election candidate under Thatcher. He lost spectacularly.

Rock might soon be feeling deja vu. The man who beat him in that 1984 Portsmouth South by-election was Mike Hancock and there’s increasing speculation in Westminster that Hancock’s behaviour — as detailed by Julie Bindel in this magazine (‘Sex party’, 2 March) — may be about to prompt another by-election there.

The details of Rock’s defeat are a reminder of how volatile politics was in the 1980s. Portsmouth South had never been anything other than Tory. In 1983, they had won the seat with a majority of the votes cast. But a year later they lost it, albeit narrowly, to the SDP-Liberal Alliance.

The constituency was Tory enough to return to the party at the 1987 general election. But in 1997, it was lost to Hancock again and the Tories have yet to regain it. In a sign of how their grass roots have withered, senior Tories now dismiss their chances of taking it back because they have so few activists in the constituency. Instead, all the talk is of Ukip and whether they can go one better than they did in Eastleigh.

A Ukip by-election triumph would certainly darken the Tory mood. Even though Ukip won converts from all three parties in Eastleigh, it seems to be costing the Tories more than anyone else. As one minister says with a note of despair in his voice, ‘There’s always going to be a protest party in British politics and the problem for us now is that the protest party is uniquely well-suited to take support from us.’

This May’s local elections are only going to deepen the Tories’ mid-term blues. They have 1,477 seats to defend compared to just 255 for Labour. Even the optimists in No. 10 are braced for a loss of several hundred.

The Tories’ problem is that the last time these seats were contested was in 2009, at the last government’s nadir. It was after those elections that James Purnell resigned from the Cabinet, saying that Labour wouldn’t win under Gordon Brown. Back then the Tories were at 42 per cent in the opinion polls and Labour at 31 per cent. Now, the Tories are bobbing around the 30 per cent mark.

If the Tories lost more than a few hundred of these seats, it wouldn’t mean that defeat was inevitable in 2015. But it would increase the panic in the parliamentary party. MPs would return to their constituencies to be confronted by vanquished councillors who blamed the coalition in London for their fate. The danger for the Tories is that it becomes a vicious circle: if those MPs then lambasted the leadership, it would make the party look divided and weaken its position still further.

The Prime Minister polls ahead of his party and it is hard to see anyone on the Tory benches who would do better than him electorally. But this hasn’t stopped some Tory MPs from agitating for a leadership contest. ‘No change, no chance’ — that old rallying cry of the Tory disaffected — is on the lips of too many MPs for the Cameroons’ comfort.

One Cabinet minister who has investigated the matter believes that 25 letters of no confidence have been sent to the chairman of the 1922 Committee. The rebels need 46 to prompt a vote, so if this is accurate, they’re more than halfway.

What then will snap the Tories out of their mid-term blues? I suspect it’ll take a sense that the party can win, or at least hold its own, in 2015. MPs who believe they’ll keep their seats keep their heads more than those who think they won’t.

The arrival of Lynton Crosby, who ran the Tories’ campaign in 2005 and has twice helped Boris Johnson to victory in London, has certainly boosted morale. Many of the MPs who feel that the Cameron set don’t get their constituents’ concerns believe that Crosby does. They’ve taken to crediting him with every improvement they see. After Cameron addressed the 1922 Committee on Monday night, one Tory backbencher — and occasional Cameron critic — said to me: ‘Much better, Crosby’s clearly honing him.’

Crosby’s return has coincided with an increase in the energy levels at Conservative Campaign Headquarters under the new chairman, Grant Shapps. Shapps is now seeing Tory MPs in marginal seats on a regular basis, ensuring that the party does everything it can to help them in 2015. Basic politics, of course — of a kind that the Tory high command has neglected for too long.

But for Tory MPs to really start to believe, the economy will have to pick up. A few quarters of sustained growth would change the political weather. Given that Osborne leads Balls as the public’s preferred Chancellor even in the current climate, one imagines that a recovery would put the shadow chancellor under acute pressure.

There is a question, though, about whether the Tory party really wants to snap out of its funk. Among a surprisingly large number of backbenchers there’s a sense that a spell in opposition and a renewal of the party’s radicalism might be for the best. One new Tory MP told me he was already thinking about the leadership contest that would follow a defeat. He had a list of the 250 colleagues he expected to survive and was busy working out which of the various contenders fared best with this group.

The Tories’ fate is in their own hands. If No. 10 becomes more political and if the party is prepared to be patient then it has a good chance in 2015. But those are very big ifs.

Listen to James Forsyth discussing a Portsmouth South by-election (at 10:28)

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