The Tory tail is up

As for David Cameron’s speech itself, I actually thought it was very good, meaty and well-judged. For once it gave some specific commitments so that we could begin to see what a Cameron administration would actually do. Many of these things struck chords with me, particularly in the areas of family, education, human rights, immigration, the EU and banning Hizb ut Tahrir. I was particularly cheered to read this on education:

I don’t think they’ve ever got to grips with the educational establishment, some of whom still think it’s wrong to say children have got something wrong, because you’ll brand them as failures, who still seem to think that all must win prizes, who still seem to think we have to treat all children the same. So we need to be courageous and strong on standards to insist that children are taught using synthetic phonics and they learn to read properly. To be clear that a GNVQ is a great exam but it’s not worth four GCSEs. To be absolutely clear that in reforming the exam bodies it is fine to make the QCA independent. It is fine to make the QCA independent but that won’t help unless the exam bodies are really put under the one group of people that want to make our exam system rigorous and tough and believable for the long term and that’s the customers. That means business, it means the universities, it means the colleges, they want our exam system to be robust for the long term and so do I.

Sentiments, indeed, that could have come from my own book, All Must Have Prizes. The reason no government has yet got to grips with our British education catastrophe — indeed, the Labour government has hugely accelerated it — is that ministers have refused to address the dysfunctional ideology, which long ago became educational orthodoxy, that no child should fail, that everyone should achieve equal outcomes and that education was not about knowledge but what children themselves brought to the party. Cameron is the first politician to allude to this key fact, to voice the heretical but obvious truth that vocational and academic qualifications do not have the same value as each other, and to suggest that the examination system should be removed from political control. Good stuff.

The speech went a long way to meeting the concerns of all those like myself who have been so horrified by the Tories’ rebranding on the left in order to ‘decontaminate’ the party in the public mind. In fact, this strategy succeeded merely in irritating the public and led many to conclude that Cameron was simply a PR flake. Ironically, it is Gordon Brown himself who has unwittingly acted as the Tories’ most effective decontamination unit. When he cast himself as the heir to Lady Thatcher and made bullish noises about crime, immigration, gambling and drugs, he made it possible for the Conservative party to step back onto its traditional ground. After all, it becomes much more difficult to accuse the Tories of lurching back to the right if a Labour Prime Minister has planted himself firmly on just such territory.

But as ever, the devil always lies in the detail. We have yet to see how all these interesting Tory policy commitments pan out in practice. And there is still a fundamental incoherence at the very heart of Cameron’s platform. He cannot promise on the one hand to empower consumers and free professionals from the dead hand of the state, while at the same time continuing to fund at their current level top-down public services such as health and education.

The Tories have come through their nightmare ‘meltdown’ week not only unscathed but much strengthened. Now they wait to see whether they have actually achieved what they set out to do — to move the polls in their favour sufficiently to stop Brown from calling the general election next month, which we have been told by the media’s finest is a 99.9% dead cert. I note with interest, however, that my excellent Mail colleague Ben Brogan is once again predicting on his blog that Brown will not call an election. One of the reasons, his people are apparently suggesting, is that they are convinced that the Tories’ tax-cutting proposals have given them ammunition for a protracted demolition campaign. Well if that’s the case, why not demolish them today? If the election really is now off, the real reason is surely likely to be that Brown fears that the Tories have scored some palpable hits and the public mood has turned against him — not least, although he might not grasp this, because of the enormous damage he did himself by his appalling conference speech, Stalinist spin operation and disgustingly cynical trip to Iraq.

What we now have, in truth, is two spin operations lined up against each other (as I suggested here in this little jeu d’esprit). Each will attempt to show that the other’s platform is an illusion spun to conceal untold horrors for the electorate. It is quite possible that both will succeed. Whoever manages, however, to persuade the voters that ‘what you see is what you get’ and that he is accordingly rock solid and dependable, will win.