Politics

Alan Johnson is the Labour leader that Cameron’s Conservatives fear

3 June 2006

Alan Johnson is the Labour leader that Cameron’s Conservatives fear

But the problem isn’t the message: it’s organisation. The Conservatives did well where they had maintained a strong local campaigning presence in opposition to Labour running the council. But in large swaths of the north, the Conservative party has almost disappeared. And you can’t vote for a party that to all intents and purposes doesn’t exist where you live. The next big task for the Conservatives is to rebuild the party as an energetic local campaigning presence in every area of the country, particularly in places which it needs to win to form a majority in Parliament.

A permanent preoccupation and ever- shifting challenge is the Labour succession. To date, the Cameroons have rightly focused their attacks on Gordon Brown. Although their attempts to define him as the ‘roadblock to reform’ have had only limited success, there is some good news for them: research shows that people think of Brown as much more left-wing, not only than Blair but also than they are themselves. But while warning of a ‘lurch to the Left’ under Brown would taste very sweet to those Conservatives who bear the scars of his attacks from previous election campaigns, the worry is that Brown is too clever not to anticipate this line of attack and will therefore be planning to start his premiership with some radical repositioning measures — even a tax cut.

A further — and even greater — worry is the possibility that Brown might not be the Labour leader they end up fighting at the next election. Mike Smithson of politicalbetting.com has dissected the lessons of recent opinion polls about a Cameron–Brown contest and they are devastating for the Chancellor. An unbroken series of ten separate opinion polls by the three leading polling companies finds that Cameron’s lead over Labour widens when Labour is led by Gordon Brown. Listening to David Cameron on Desert Island Discs and then reading Gordon Brown’s recent interview with New Woman explains why.