It’s time to lurch towards the public

Much of the post-Boris analysis in today’s press features on whether a rightwards shift is appropriate. The Daily Mail calls for a return to Tory values, while Matthew Parris in The Times says such calls are predictable and meaningless. But, to me, talk about moving to the right or the left is pretty pointless. As the Telegraph says in its leader today, what’s needed isn’t a lurch to the right, but a lurch towards the public. This comes back to the great, eternally-relevant distinction that Keith Joseph made between the ‘middle ground’ between political parties, and the ‘common ground’ between a party and the public.
 
The problem with what Peter Oborne called ‘the political class’ is that too many of the guys calling the shots today spent too long in political studies seminars and not long enough trying out the real world.. Nick Clegg was actually educated next door to the House of Commons: from sixth-form to the Cabinet involved moving a quarter of a mile. It’s a staggeringly parochial world, and having ex-special advisers go on to run the government means a tendency to focus on Westminster factions at the best of times. In the coalition era, where Cameron regards government as a balancing act between Tories and Lib Dems, the SW1 politics game becomes more myopic than ever. So, on days like this, everything is seen through a prism about ‘don’t lurch to the right’, or ‘that’s what IDS did in 2003 and look where it got us’. There is a depressing tendency amongst the Cameroons of dreaming up ever-better ways of winning the 2001 election, paying far too little attention to how Britain has changed since.
 
Election time always delivers a shock to the MPs’ systems because they get out campaigning, actually meet the people in whose name they govern, and usually return struck by certain problems. It can be the plight of the “those inner-cities” (Thatcher, 1987), the concern about anti-social behaviour (Blair, 2005) or the resentment about welfare-dependent families (everyone, 2010). It’s pretty apparent now, with the humiliating rejection of the elected Mayoral agenda, that there is no appetite for constitutional change — and a bafflement as to why this obsesses the MPs. People want jobs, they worry about the cost of living, and the relative success of UKIP (whose candidates won, on average, 13 per cent of the vote where they stood) reminds us about the gulf between the public’s view on Europe and that of the Westminster parties.
 
Sure, coalition is a balancing act — Cameron cannot behave as if he has a Tory majority. But is the balance right? The Lib Dems have 9 per cent of the seats. Every party ought to address these basic concerns and want to do things to reduce the cost of living or promote growth, rather than the pile of largely-irrelevant nonsense that is expected to stuff the Queen’s Speech. It wouldn’t surprise me if we’d see an extension of paternity leave, placing yet another burden on small business and another break on jobs.
 
Cameron ought not to spend this weekend worrying about left or right. He ought to be concerned about a government agenda better in tune with the public’s concerns. ‘Better off with Boris’ was a simple, and demonstrably true proposition: this Mayor makes you better off by cutting his share of your taxes by 10 per cent. The simplicity of this approach may dismay the guys with the 1sts in PPE and the bookshelves groaning with the weight of political texts. But the gap to worry about is not between the Tories and the Middle Ground — it’s the gap between the coalition and the priorities of normal voters. That’s the gap which Cameron ought to close.