Cameron is alienating his voters

29 July 2006

Labour’s thoughtful abstainers want to know what happened to their traditional values — which include support of family life. They, too, are concerned at the balkanisation of society, and they don’t like their Prime Minister’s marsupial relationship with the USA.

Labour’s best hope is that Chancellor Brown will become prime minister before the consequences of his eight years of spending, taxing and borrowing arrive as even more taxing, higher interest rates and inflation. There would be a fair chance that his undeserved reputation for conservative economic policies, his lack of personal avarice and his support for sterling and family life would reassure moderate opinion and allow him to woo back Labour’s lost voters with leftist mood music. Even at the worst, it is hard to believe that in an election soon after becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown would be less popular than Tony Blair.

In the Tory camp, Mr Cameron has been doing his best to distance the Conservative party from both its bedrock core vote and its 4 or 5 million estranged former voters. The Modern Conservatives give the impression that respectable working- and lower-middle-class supporters in the suburbs, country towns and villages are not quite good enough for the new ‘A’ list, Notting Hill party. The strategy seems to be aimed at persuading Liberal and Labour voters that the Cameron party shares their beliefs and aspirations and would deliver Blairism where Blair has failed.

Bromley suggests that while Con- servative voters do believe that the new Conservative party is unlike the one they used to support, Mr Cameron’s target Labour and Liberal voters do not, and the Tories are in danger of missing the electoral opportunity of a lifetime.

The Blair government is failing on every front. Like a victim of Ebola fever, the vital organs of government are ceasing to function. It can tax and it can spend — but it is unable to deliver. There is a deep longing for something better, but it has to be a lot better than what is on offer today.