Cameron’s political language

24 February 2007

The US pollster Frank Luntz has made a huge impact on recent British political conference seasons. Here he explains why the Tory leader is pulling ahead of the Chancellor — and what the American political scene has to teach them both

The problem with Mr Brown isn’t a lack of familiarity; it is over-familiarity. Much the same is true of America, where the electorate threw out the Republican party in 2006 because they saw Republican senators, Republican congressmen and a Republican president who had grown stale and were desperately short on new ideas. Just last week, a united and newly minted Democratic congressional majority, along with more than a handful of Republicans, passed a resolution criticising President Bush over the war in Iraq. The public has spoken, and Congress has obeyed.

The British electorate has a similar fatigue with the Labour party. At some point in every government, the voters and their chosen political partners decide to part ways because it just isn’t working any more, no matter how tight the relationship once seemed to be.

Gordon Brown certainly has his admirers. Labour party members will tell you, misty-eyed, about Brown’s maiden speech at Westminster and how he excoriated the Thatcher government’s record on unemployment. Later, when the employment minister, Norman Tebbit, asserted that thousands of jobs had been generated in window-cleaning, Brown bellowed in a Scottish rumble from the backbenches, ‘Perhaps the Minister thinks we should become a nation of window-cleaners!’

It was powerful. It was brilliant. It was that mixture of humour and genuine outrage that made the politics of the 1980s so compelling. It was also, without doubt, the real Gordon Brown — a political battering-ram armed to the teeth with statistics and Scottish ire who dispensed with political foes with rhetorical relish. The trouble for Mr Brown is that it was also a quarter of a century ago. Politics has changed. Britain has changed. Gordon Brown has not changed, say the floating voters I’ve interviewed.

Now consider David Cameron. In his maiden speech in 2001 he praised his Labour constituency predecessor and, rather than picking fights over Europe or fox-hunting, focused on saving his local hospital from ‘that dreaded R-word, rationalisation’. Then, as now, he sought to reach across the political divide with an equal measure of pleasantry and passion.

This was — and is — the public David Cameron, a man driven by purpose rather than partisanship, declaration rather than division, a real person more than a policy wonk. He may not play well within the Conservative think-tank community, but he does play well among the electorate.