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Saturday 22 November 2008

Web Extra: The Tories should fear the dynamic new team of professionals that Brown is assembling

As he slowly drops his clannish approach to management, the door opens to talented non-believers. One is Jennifer Moses, a former Goldman Sachs managing director and former head of CentreForum—a (surprisingly good) Liberal Democrat think-tank. She is a New Jersey Democrat with no party in Britain and like many Britons with no party she aligned herself with the LibDems. She knows policy, and only last month wrote a spirited article for Prospect blaming Mr Brown’s benefits system for ‘huge financial disincentives to move from welfare to work’.

She is also involved in ARC, the schools group which runs City Academies, and only a few months ago had a run in with Mr Balls, the Schools Secretary, about whether he was curtailing the freedom of City Academies. Once, such people would have been labelled enemies by Team Brown – and considered either confused or malign. But this has changed: her reward for a detailed critique of his government’s shortcomings was the offer of a desk in 10 Downing Street policy unit.

The next approach has been made to David Muir, one of the most respected figures in the world of new media and advertising, who ran a division of the WPP empire and has co-authored a well-received book, The Business of Brands. He has in the same background as Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s chief strategist – but is arguably a higher-achiever. Mr Hilton went his own way and set up a business selling the idea of Social Responsibility to the corporate sector (and, latterly, to the Tories). Mr Muir has remained inside the advertising world, and his task will be to revive the badly damaged Brown brand. His appointment perhaps marks an acceptance that Mr Hilton has worked wonders detoxifying the Tory brand – and now a similar chap is needed to rehabilitate Labour’s.

So it is futile to argue, as many Conservatives still do, that nothing of any substance is happening in 10 Downing Street and that Mr Brown is a rather large Scottish bunny frozen in the headlights. He has a new machine, fundamentally different to that which so spectacularly mishandled the botched election-that-never-was and Northern Rock. The orderly Cabinet reshuffle which followed Peter Hain’s resignation and last week’s well-received welfare reform plans give a better taste of what the Tories might expect from now on. 

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