It is a story that could have been scripted to boost morale in Conservative headquarters. At five o’clock one morning, security guards at 10 Downing Street were called in to intercept an intruder only to find the Prime Minister trying to enter his own office.
Apart from the delicious image this conjures of Gordon Brown in his pyjamas, cursing as he bashes in the security code, it caricatures him as the ideal political opponent. An inept, flailing control freak, whose own shortcomings will lose Labour the next election.
Alas for the Tories, this story is several months out of date. It took place in the earliest days of the Brown premiership, when he had no home access to the Prime Minister’s computer, forcing him to sneak downstairs to the office. Much has changed since then. For a start, he can now happily access the Prime Minister’s computer from his flat if he’s up early with the children. And he also has far higher-quality hands at the tiller. The latest developments are, for the Tories, no laughing matter.
The PM is building an increasingly professional team in No. 10 — and, more importantly, learning to trust it. What is more, the new Brown operation strikes a formidable contrast with Tory head office.
The crunch came at the end of last year, when Mr Brown realised that his plan to run No. 10 using former Treasury officials and Brownite apparatchiks had failed. The evidence was, by then, piled high, with Northern Rock at the top. So he sent Tom Scholar, his chief of staff, back to the Treasury (the official line is that his appointment was transitory) and hired Stephen Carter, an outsider with an extraordinary CV.
He is just 44, but already has a wealth of management experience. In the past ten years alone he has run the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson UK, NTL (now Virgin Media), the regulator Ofcom, and the stellar public relations agency Brunswick. So Mr Carter is, to put it mildly, one of the more capable men wandering around Whitehall.
He works in tandem with Jeremy Heywood, brought back from Morgan Stanley to the new post of permanent secretary at No. 10. Heywood was once principal private secretary to Norman Lamont –who called him one of the most intelligent men he had ever met.
Even the most paranoid Prime Minister could trust his abilities — which Mr Brown is doing. The PM no longer takes part in the No. 10 early morning conference call — where Whitehall’s commanders are given their marching orders. Instead, he has ceded the floor to Mr Carter who ensures everything is in order then reports back
If an issue arose with another department, Mr Brown’s instinct was to engage in some light telephone terrorism by ringing the Cabinet member involved. Now, say those inside No10, he will leave it to Carter and Heywood to talk to their counterparts and resolve the issue. In the early days, Brown was once notorious for refusing to release any document or plan he had not signed off – making No 10 a bottleneck. Now, he is content to hear Carter or Heywood has given the all clear.
The tone of conversations inside No10 has already changed. Those who overhear Mr Carter and Mr Heywood in their meetings with Mr Brown say that phrases like ‘It’s OK, we’ll fix it’ or “it’s all right, we’ll deal with it” are common. The Prime Minister’s supporters say he’s always devolved to people he trusted – it’s just that he could count the people he trusted on two hands. Now, in Carter and Heywood, he has come the closest to replacing Ed Balls and Ed Miliband – whom he lost to the Commons in 2005 and now serve in his Cabinet. “Gordon is normally very, very slow to trust new people,” one Brownite tells me. “But he trusts Carter.” It may sound incredible, but Gordon is slowly letting go.
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.
It is an entirely new No10 operation. This is appreciated by the Blairites, “This shows the core Brownite team were not up to government,” says one former Blair staffer. “Although they spent ten years scoffing at us.” The Tories appear to have not yet have appreciated the scale of the change in the nature of their enemy. It is as if Mr Brown – a lifelong fan of Goldman Sachs – has called in the company to revamp his government as if Brown Inc were a struggling company fighting a hostile takeover bid from a predator.
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.
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.
There is Oliver Dowden and Richard Hardyment who were – rightly or wrongly – credited with the digging which led to the donorgate scandal which imploded on Mr Brown at the end of last year. Then George Bridges, formerly Mr Cameron’s political secretary. All three have drifted away in recent months —bright young men who, for whatever reason, did not see their future with the Tories.
Those who remain grumble about lack of direction. Caroline Spelman, the party chairman, is regarded as a cipher, and there is no chief of staff figure running Central Office in the way Lord Ashcroft leads his marginal seat team. While Mr Cameron may on occasion wish he were shot of Lord Ashcroft so he did not have to continually answer questions about this Lord’s tax status, he cannot afford to lose perhaps the best-performing part of the CCHQ operation that works well. There was no election last October partly because Lord Ashcroft had prepared the marginal seats so brilliantly. What’s needed is more of his organisational skills, runs the argument, not less of it.
The absence of campaign veterans creates of a lack of “institutional memory”, says one staffer. Dowden, in particular, was renowned for his encyclopaedic knowledge of past strategies. There is a feeling of being dragged into a succession of short-term battles – a sense of permanent crisis meetings. The good news is that the Tories are doing better, usually winning these day-to-day fights. But inside Tory head office, staff who are given a few days to rush out policy fear this is being done to the exclusion of a wider narrative.
Take, for example, Mr Cameron’s pledge last month to clear parks of teenage gangs so children are better able to play outside. This was inspired not to highlight any principle, but by an internal polling presentation from Lord Ashcroft showing that Mr Cameron is losing the support of mothers. More proposals, on subjects like maternity leave, are on the way. Prisons on Monday, defence on Tuesday — the party hops from one topic to another with little time taken to hammer any point home.
‘You can get it if you really want’ runs the current Tory advertising slogan. But get what? The problem is not that Mr Cameron has no answer. The problem is that he has about a dozen — and cannot narrow them down. Many of his policies, such as welfare reform, are radical and urgently needed. Some are worth casting a Tory vote just to see them enacted, such as Michael Gove’s promise of school reform. But no policy has yet been explained in a way the ordinary voter can understand.
Parties can handle, at most, three messages at election time – and these messages need to be forged two years beforehand. This was Lynton Crosby’s complaint when called in to work for Michael Howard. One cannot fatten a pig before market day, he would say. Even Tory officials who hated Crosby’s strategy talk about how the leadership during that period was exemplary. “It was like firing a gun”, one said. “You’d have the target, fashion the bullet, detonate. Easy, clear instructions.”
Mr Crosby is now working for Boris Johnson’s Mayoral campaign and could – in theory – be available to Mr Cameron after May. But this is not seen as a likely option. He would want to be the Alpha Male in a central office which already suffers from having “too many hands on the steering wheel” as one aide puts it. Nor is he understood to be a fan of Mr Cameron.
The irony is that the four at the top of Tory structure – Mr Cameron, Mr Hilton, George Osborne and Andy Coulson – are working well together. The ideas are bold and innovative. The problem is the interface between this quartet and the rest of the machine leaves a feeling that this creative quartet is firing off more ideas than can be managed. Mr Brown likes to accuse the Tories of having no policies yet the reverse is true. The party is suffering from policy indigestion.
The most sobering aspect of this came in an internal poll which found 90 per cent of the public cannot name any Tory policy announced more than a month ago. In an attempt to touch all bases, Mr Cameron runs the risk of reaching none. “There is feeling that the leadership get bored easily,” says one official. “And boredom is absolutely lethal in politics.” As Alastair Campbell was fond of saying, the public only begin to hear a message when the politicians and the press are sick to the back teeth of it.
Yet the successes of Team Cameron have been profound. Had it not been for the brand detoxification from Mr Hilton, there would have been no radical Tory policy on welfare. The party has earned permission to address issues like immigration. The intellectual headway made since the Blackpool conference has been remarkable; witness the way Labour’s rapid rebuttal unit has mutated into a rapid assimilation unit where ministers copy Tory policies. Yet Mr Cameron walks this terrain like an oil prospector, digging a little and regularly finding promise of black gold underneath. Yet, he has not dug deep enough on any one spot to strike.
The Tory press operation is another success. It outguns the government so often that ministers are whingeing to (and on) the BBC. Yet again, it is feared the results of this – favourable comment in the newspapers – is being confused for real progress. “I never confused the Guardian leader column with the vox populi,” wrote Baroness Thatcher in her memoirs. A message that chimes with the London media elite may not resonate north of Watford. The Cameron policies can be compared to Capital FM: great sounds, but they don’t get it up north.
One heartening comparison is that, at this stage in the electoral cycle, Baroness Thatcher had not yet commissioned the Stepping Stones document which laid out a clear five-step path to power and government. There is still time for one. But until there is then there is a limit to the longer-term progress the party will make. ‘It’s like the Somme in 1916,’ says a shadow cabinet member. ‘We’re fighting all out, all the time, and we gain a little bit of ground. They fight back, win a little territory back. Neither of us is getting far.’
Mr Brown may be overdue a disaster – but depending on one is a very dangerous strategy. Even the Prime Minister’s enemies within Labour will say that, of all his instincts, the desire to acquire and keep political power eclipses all others. So a 57-year-old man may not change his personality, but he will change his tactics if he believes the old ones are leading him to oblivion. Admitting weakness to the extent that he has, is a strength which few thought Mr Brown had in him.
Of course Mr Brown’s new team may yet collapse. When Ms Moses starts work, she may declare Mr Balls insufferable (she is a millionaire who does not need the money). The new team of experts in No10 may tire of him, or vice versa. The Prime Minister can be considered a recovering control freak on a 12-step rehabilitation plan, and could relapse into his old ways at any time.
But the Tories should focus on a just as likely an outcome: that his plan works, that the Goldman Sachs treatment works as well for Team Brown as it does for the failing companies they restructure. And that the enemy so many of their MPs have already written off may become stronger than ever.
Comments