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Thursday 20 November 2008

Beneath the radar, the Tory party is working on a strategy to win by a landslide

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

As it happens, it may be Labour which first breaks free from Mr Cameron’s unwanted embrace. Since Boris Johnson’s victory there has been much evidence of Labour returning to the left. There is something about the Mayor of London which arouses Labour’s baser instincts — here is someone not in the least ashamed about his background, who has been elected in spite of it. He acts as a blond matador, tempting out Labour’s bullish inner demons which Tony Blair tried to keep at bay. The ‘toff’ line of attack is back.

It was revived to ignominious effect at Crewe, where Labour activists dressed in top hats to deride the wealth of Edward Timpson, the Tory candidate. That he was later found to be no more grand than any other old boy of Manchester Grammar is par for the course. As Tories know, when an opinion poll lead disappears, party discipline soon follows. The ‘toff’ jibes, together with the new restive mood in the Commons and the shriller voices on the abortion debate, suggest that Labour is now moving inexorably to the left.

To suggest that this has been orchestrated by 10 Downing Street is to exaggerate the control the Prime Minister exerts over his party. Stephen Carter, who has organised Mr Brown’s recent forays on to the internet, is understood to be aghast at the class war line of attack. But if the Labour rank and file is hunting for dividing lines with Mr Cameron’s Conservatives, it will keep moving in this direction.

Here lies Mr Cameron’s opportunity. It was Labour’s departure to the outer reaches of left-wing politics in the 1980s that emboldened the Thatcher government and allowed it to enact the economic reform which so transformed this country. If Labour moves leftwards, so Mr Cameron could find he has the space he needs to offer low-income voters a meaningful choice on election day by pledging to cut their taxes.

Mr Cameron remains wary of hubris, and reproaches colleagues who sound too optimistic. ‘I’m superstitious!’ he exclaimed in shadow Cabinet recently, when the mood became too buoyant. But as one senior party strategist puts it, ‘the earth moved on the day of the local elections’. Labour has a leader so unpopular they dare not use his photograph or even his name on election literature. And he is determined to stay for two more years hoping — like John Major and Mr Micawber before him — that something will turn up.

One might argue that Mr Cameron does not deserve this opportunity, has not earned it. But it is his anyway. He is astute enough to distinguish between the brutal wave of hostility to Gordon Brown rippling across the nation in May 2008, and bankable support for his own party two years hence. The difference between a workable Tory majority and a Tory landslide may well depend on the extent to which he can assure low-income voters in places like Crewe, with robust policy promises, that they will be better off under the Conservatives. Mr Cameron has a year — at most — in which to decide if this is a gamble he is willing to take.

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