The Labour party is uneasy. For 11 years it has made the political weather. It has set the terms of debate; its intellectual totalitarianism has almost succeeded in branding any non-New Labour position as illegitimate. Now, everything has changed. On the underground, in pubs, people are talking about David Cameron. Though he has hardly done or said anything yet, he has reintroduced excitement to British politics. Some shrewd Labour analysts fear that events have escaped from their control and are not sure how to recapture them.
Mr Cameron has been lucky in his timing. He arrived at the moment when a lot of voters were falling out of love with Tony Blair. The simperings, the facile little tricks of speech — the minor faults of character — all the traits which used to arouse affection and a protective instinct now merely exasperate and set teeth on edge. Once that happens, the relationship never recovers. Fed up with Mr Blair, bored with politics, a large section of the electorate was, without realising it, already in the market for something new. Believing that they have now found it, they are willing David Cameron to succeed, in a way that a lot of people cheered on Tony Blair after 1994.
Nor is it clear that Labour could divert those cheers to Gordon Brown. Some Labour people argue that a Brown premiership could relaunch a faltering Labour government, just as John Major revived the Tories’ fortunes in 1990. Others are less sure. Like Mr Cameron now, Mr Major had the advantage of being largely unknown, as did Tony Blair in 1994. Mr Brown is hardly unknown. He has been so intimately involved with this administration that it could be impossible for him to persuade the voters to reassess it.
The comparison may be less with John Major than with Anthony Eden. By the early 1950s he was Churchill’s inevitable successor. There was no realistic alternative. Yet many senior Tories knew in their bones that this would not work; Eden would find a way of going wrong. They were right. They have plenty of equivalents in today’s Labour party, not least in No. 10 Downing Street.
Labour is, of course, planning a counterattack. As soon as Mr Cameron becomes Tory leader, every government spokesman will claim that he is both an upper-class twit and a demented tax-cutter who would make Margaret Thatcher seem like Florence Nightingale. So far, so predictable, but some Blairites are not sure that it will work. During the Labour party conference, a very senior BBC executive had dinner with three Cabinet ministers. He told me that they all expressed a wary regard for David Cameron. The same is true of Tony Blair.
The other day I had a fascinating conversation with a man who is able to watch Mr Blair closely. In his view, the PM is becoming more and more detached from day-to-day politics, and from the Labour party (if that is possible). Increasingly, he is conversing with history and worrying about his legacy, while oscillating between vanity and self-doubt. At one moment, he believes that he has reshaped British politics as fundamentally as Margaret Thatcher did. Five minutes later, he is fretting about wasted time and missed opportunities.
My observant friend thinks that Mr Blair might be making another calculation. Just as the ultimate tribute to Thatcherism’s remodelling of British politics was a non-socialist Labour government, Mr Blair may now be concluding that the triumph of Blairism requires a Tory government which accepts its central tenet: the need to reconcile economic growth and well-financed public services. Though David Cameron does not regard himself as Tony Blair’s heir, the PM may disagree. At times, my friend thinks, Mr Blair may almost believe that the inheritance would be safer in Mr Cameron’s hands than in Mr Brown’s.
If Mr Blair did hold that view and were to go public with it, it is not clear which would suffer more damage: his standing with Labour supporters or Mr Cameron’s with Tory ones. The claim that David Cameron is merely Blair Mark II would do Mr Cameron some harm among simpler-minded members of the Tory tribe.
Their anxieties are doubly unfounded. In the first place, no Tory should allow Tony Blair to claim economic strength and good public services as his creed. Every Tory government since the war has pursued those objectives — not least, nor least successfully, Margaret Thatcher’s. It was only the 18-year ineptitude of Tory propaganda which enabled the myth of Tory cuts to saturate the voters’ consciousness, thus permitting Tony Blair to claim the quotidian practices of his Tory predecessors as his own dramatic innovation.
Second, there is a fundamental difference between David Cameron and Tony Blair. Unlike the Prime Minister, Mr Cameron has a coherent political identity. One reason why Mr Blair is still so confused about his place in history is that even after eight years in office, he still does not know what, if anything, he really believes.
Mr Cameron does. But he is also aware that changing the way in which Britain is governed is a slow, complex process, more akin to navigating a supertanker through the English Channel than to driving a speedboat around a small harbour. He knows what he would like to achieve by the end of a Cameron first term. The public finances would be back under control and public spending would have fallen as a proportion of GDP. Within the public sector, there would have been substantial redistribution of resources from waste to front-line services. The control of public expenditure would have created room for significant tax cuts.
In schools, parents would have much greater choice and control, opening the road to a fully-fledged voucher scheme. In health, patients would have much more freedom. There would be many more policemen catching criminals; rather fewer attending seminars on race and gender.
On Europe, he would launch a major diplomatic initiative to find allies, in pursuit of British goals, including the reform of the CAP. He would aim to regain the control of our own social and employment policies which Labour lost by signing the Social Chapter. He would have no truck with any attempts to relaunch European federalism.
If he could achieve most of those objectives, he would have laid the foundations of a long and successful period of Tory government. But none of it would be easy. It will all require a long march through the institutions and a relentless battle with the small print. From the outset of his campaign, David Cameron has refused to indulge in the fraudulent radicalism of easy answers. While winning the support of the Tory selectorate, he would also like to educate it in the realities of government. On the evidence thus far, he may be succeeding.
Not that he is facing much opposition. Judged by his campaign, David Davis believes that the Tory membership is chippy, nasty, resentful and dim. Anyone who wishes the Tory party well can only hope that Mr Davis is confusing its members with his shaving mirror.
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