When Flash Gordon met the man with a plan

Thursday, 20th November 2008

Matthew d’Ancona looks back at the political twists and turns that shaped 2008

When Cameron became leader in 2005, he presented himself as the ‘heir to Blair’ and promised a soft-focus government that would put greenery and something called ‘general well-being’ at the heart of its endeavours. By September, the Tory leader admitted that his inheritance would be closer to Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979 than Blair’s in 1997: that his first years as PM, should he be elected, would be consumed by ‘disaster recovery’. The Cameroons end 2008 still on course for power but hastily rethinking their mission. The next Conservative government, if it is to prosper, must be more than pragmatically benign. It will have to take very difficult decisions indeed: Cameron must prove that he is indeed, as he said at the party’s conference in Birmingham, a ‘man with a plan’.

Certainly, the PM looks in his element at last, no longer reminding one of an overworked accountant on the verge of nervous collapse. His worry lines, insomnia and difficulties with smiling are of the moment: grey is the new black.

Yet by May 2010 — still the likeliest election date — Gordon’s reinvention as a superhero will be a distant memory. Brown believes that time is on his side, that we shall all recover from our collective bout of false consciousness and acknowledge the wisdom of his ‘long-term decisions’. Yet the disclosure that the state-owned Northern Rock is now twice as likely to repossess homes as other banks was truly symbolic. In the Thatcher era, the state liberated voters by selling them their council houses. Now the state has turned repo man. In 2008, Britain’s unemployment figures rose to an eight-year high, with worse to come. The fundamentals, as they say, look dire.

Before then, it is true, Mr Cameron must say much more about how he would undertake the bleak task of economic reconstruction. But what really matters is that, while Brown trots the globe and soaks up the adulation, the Tory leader makes himself the visible and authentic spokesman of the real world.

Cameron is still headed for Number 10. But if he makes it, his path to power will not have been linear, straightforward or easy. He wobbled badly in 2007. In the past 12 months he has watched Brown rise from the dead to posture as Flash Gordon. The future is gloriously unpredictable. What a year; 2009 could scarcely be more exciting — could it?

Matthew d’Ancona is editor of The Spectator.