Today’s newspapers are another treat for Conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude. Blair has, overnight, denied that he’s authorising briefings against Brown. But he doesn’t need to. They’ve been at it for days, not just old Blairites but non-aligned backbenchers. Brown is a dud, they proclaim, with no vision. Cameron is a hero, the polls proclaim, setting the agenda. Just a fortnight ago, the conventional wisdom was the exact opposite.
The tables are turning too often for my liking: I’d like them bolted down where they are. But only Cameron can do that, and only by bolting down the vision of Conservatism he announced in Blackpool. Had he flopped in that conference, today’s press would be full of analysis explaining why he’ll be gone by Christmas and his failure had become inevitable. We must not forget that it was Cameron’s recovery, not the preceding slump, which was the freak event.
His latest dictum “look at me and think of Arnold Schwarzenegger” was meant as a joke but sounds too much like hubris for my liking. His parliamentary performances last week were superlative. But as I argue in my News of the World column today, of the two of then, Brown is the real Terminator. He may look dead now with his authority in tatters and rebels rebounding but—as Blair found—he’s very hard to destroy. He’ll be back, but not until he’s terminated those Labour rebels who are sniping at him now. This creates a window for Cameron to consolidate his lead. So will he continue the Blackpool agenda of tax cuts and radical reform? Or was this a deathbed conversion to Conservatism which will be forgotten now that he has survived?
Plan A was to assimilate Labour, so voters would not be risking much of a change by dumping Brown. This model depended on Brown being despised. When he was not, the Tories had no Plan B – until they developed one, panic stations, in Blackpool. It was more popular then they could possibly imagine. Wisconsin-style welfare reform, Swedish-style school reform, lower taxes, the type of Conservatism which they had been bullied (by Brown) into thinking was deeply unpopular.
If Cameron will win the next election, he’ll recognise Plan A was tested to destruction (and destruction was where he was certainly heading) and Plan B, the courage to break free of Labour’s view of the world, is rewarded by Tory ratings of 43% – the best since before Black Wednesday. He said in California that he’s leery of “clear blue water” – the language of the doomed Plan A. Yes, Brown’s in a whole pile of trouble. But he’ll recover, as he always does. It is imperative that, by then, Cameron takes this rare chance to open an intellectual lead that Labour will never be able to close.
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