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Wednesday 9 July 2008

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

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

Two recruits have joined No. 10 in the last week. One is Jennifer Moses, a former Goldman Sachs managing director and former head of CentreForum, a (surprisingly good) Liberal Democrat think-tank. Just last month she wrote a spirited article blaming Mr Brown’s benefits system for ‘huge financial disincentives to move from welfare to work’. Her new home is the No. 10 policy unit. She will soon be joined by 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.

Any venture capital firm would be delighted with such a team of turnaround specialists. Yet what is striking about Mr Brown’s new recruits is that there is hardly a Labour party membership card among them: these are not the fanatical Brownite guerrillas of New Labour Mark One. Mr Carter has no ideological bent and Mr Heywood is considered a natural conservative. It is as if Brown Inc. were a company facing a hostile takeover, advised by Goldmans to hire a new management team. A common technique in the City, and in American politics — but not in Westminster.

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.

The Conservative operation now perched in Labour’s old home of Millbank contains no former Goldman Sachs partners or chiefs. Indeed, one is hard-pushed to find many with experience of the 2001 election campaign, let alone wider industry. It is also losing, rather than attracting, stars. Oliver Dowden, Richard Hardyment and George Bridges have drifted away in recent months — all bright young men who, for whatever reason, did not see their future with the Tories.

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