All bets are off

30 June 2007

Fraser Nelson says that the new Prime Minister has positioned himself in territory that the Tories have left vacant, and is ready to fight a cultural battle to defend the ‘British way of life’ and win over the C1 voters who decide elections

All of this takes us into strange political territory. As Mr Brown vigorously protects his right flank, and Mr Cameron moves the Conservatives ‘into the mainstream’ (as he defines it), it is hard to see which party is positioned where. Mr Cameron says that upfront promises of tax cuts threaten ‘stability’; Mr Brown keeps his counsel. On the environment, NHS reform and private equity, the Conservatives are now attacking from the left. So amid all this political cross-dressing, Mr Brown is presenting himself as the safer bet for Middle Britain.

He has made remarkable progress in a short space of time. Last summer, he rather wonderfully declared that ‘my wife comes from Middle England’, as if he were a mediaeval king who wished to make peace with a new dominion by marrying a local. Now he realises he is not engaged in battle for a territory but a cultural war, which he can win by posing as a heavyweight statesman with an instinctive grasp of ordinary Britons’ anxieties and aspirations versus decadent, faddish Mr Cameron with his hopelessly out-of-touch coterie.

Part one of the strategy has been to persuade voters that everything they believe about him is wrong. Do they consider Mr Brown sour-faced? He has been pictured smiling more often — sometimes embarrassingly so — than he has in the last decade. Intolerant of criticism? Nope: he is happy for anti-war protesters to camp outside Parliament. A pensions thief? Expect a pensions revamp to deal with this head-on. Ruthlessly tribal? No, he’s welcomed Mr Davies with open arms and offered government jobs to the Liberal Democrats.

His ‘government of all the talents’ will dramatise this new ‘inclusiveness’ in the days ahead. But the full marching orders for the new Cabinet will not come until the autumn, when he releases the Spending Review that was drafted months ago. It sets the budget for every department until April 2011, thereby emasculating the new Chancellor at a stroke of the pen. Mr Brown may have parachuted out of the Treasury, but he has programmed its autopilot for the next four years. His Chancellor need only sit in the cockpit and smile.