Leading article

A man worthy to be Prime Minister

6 October 2007

The Spectator on David Cameron

That electoral opportunity may indeed be imminent. It is pointless to speculate about the election date, since the decision will be taken by one man and one man alone — and may not have been taken yet. Certainly, Mr Brown’s conduct this week was entirely consistent with the behaviour of a politician preparing to go to the country. The use of Treasury research not previously released to the Commons in order to rebut Mr Osborne’s tax calculations was a deeply cynical act by a Prime Minister who has made so much of his love of Parliament. The same is true of Mr Brown’s announcement on troop redeployment in Iraq — a flagrant breach of his longstanding promise to tell MPs first about these plans in next week’s Commons statement.

Whatever he now chooses to do, Mr Brown’s strategy can be said to have backfired. If he calls an election, he will face a Conservative party more united around a set of policies than it has been since the fall of Margaret Thatcher. If he lets caution win the day, the Tories — if they are wise — will cling jealously to the initiative that they have seized, and will also portray the PM relentlessly as ‘Brown the Bottler’, the man who rattled his sabre and then timorously replaced it in its scabbard.

None of this means that Mr Cameron is suddenly on course for victory. It does mean that he has graduated from a successful party moderniser to a prospective Prime Minister of this country. He has called his opponent’s bluff. Over to you, Mr Brown.

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Michael Booth

October 5th, 2007 8:43pm Report this comment

Please don't get carried away. Cameron was satisfactory; the conference not a disaster. But 38% in the polls (the best of the ones I noticed on the newstand today) is still appalling after 10 years of a tired government. The last three parliamentary bye-election results were indeed disastrous and the name Tory still sparks derision over vast tracks of England and most of Scotland and Wales. The truth is that "brand decontamination" is spin-masters response to a little local difficulty (and I would argue wholly unworthy of a house-view for the Spectator). The Tory party's problems are far more fundamental than that and will only be solved a re-think that puts that of 1975-1979 into the shade.

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