My thanks to John O’Sullivan for his response to my post on Friday. A post that was so “well hidden” (as he puts it) that it was the top post for four hours and on my blog’s front-page all weekend.
I’m grateful too that he sees fit to remind me that the current electoral set-up gives Labour a considerable advantage. I wish someone had pointed that out sooner.
Just to re-cap: Mr O’Sulivan thinks that the biggest question of this campaign is why the Tories aren’t winning by more. To which I’d say that actually they are winning but that there are a number of other factors that prevent us from seeing this clearly. If Cameron beats Brown by seven points in the popular vote he will have beaten Labour by the same margin that Mrs Thatcher prevailed by in 1979. Should she have beaten Labour more handsomely? Does that victory seem insubstantial? I think not and nor will Cameron’s. Sure, there are differences and the Lady won a greater share of the vote but times change and it’s the margin by which the Tories beat Labour that matters most.
Mr O’Sullivan writes: “To begin with, the Tories need a landslide to win a small victory not because of the 2005 election but because of the anti-Tory bias in the electoral system.” True, but if the Tories had won more seats in 2005 their task would be easier now. Yes, the constituency boundaries would still be against them but they’d still be starting from a better position. This doesn’t seem a difficult point to grasp.
In my original post I suggested that “Cameron is damned for not winning a thumping majority but if he did win one then we’d hear that all this renewal and reform and change stuff wasn’t at all necessary.” Mr O’Sullivan doesn’t like this and cautions me to “respond to what others say and write rather than to what he thinks they privately believe”.
This being so, let it be noted that, cunningly Mr O’Sullivan has found a way to blame Cameron for the 2005 failure as well as for the failure to be 25 points ahead of Labour in 2010. I’m sure there are things that Mr O’Sullivan thinks aren’t Dave’s fault but, alas, we’re never told what they may be and I would not be so bold or daring as to speculate upon such mysteries.
Sure, Cameron was partly responsible for writing the Tory manifesto in 2005 but it was not his campaign and it seems a stretch to argue, as Mr O’Sullivan does, that Cameron is the (partial) author of the disaster he inherited.
Having planted this mischievous thought, Mr O’Sullivan walks away from it. As it happens, I agree with him that the Tories were much too slow to appreciate the unsustainable nature of Brown’s public spending. Had they done more work on that front a few years ago they might be listened to with more attention today and been better placed to refute the argument that “spending = investment”. Nor, it must be admitted, has George Osborne been an obvious electoral asset.
I concede that there are Tory members who wonder what has happened to their party and for whom much of the decontamination process must have been an unpleasant, even inexplicable business and that some of them must think their party has been taken stolen from them. Mind you, that’s what Antediluvian Labour thought about Neil Kinnock and then, later, Tony Blair too.
I don’t think Project Dave has been a consistent or total success and one of the reasons for thinking that is the number of people one encounters who don’t quite believe in it or think it suspect or simply spin. From this I conclude that the problem lies in not persuading people that the party really has changed, not that it has changed too much.
Doubtless there are those who won’t vote Tory because they’d rather vote UKIP (perhaps Mr O’Sullivan falls into this category?) but I’d wager they’re fewer in number than those who voted Tory in 1992 but Labour or Lib Dem subsequently and, just as importantly, that they’re probably more likely to live in safe Tory seats than elsewhere.
But, yes, it is a worry (from a Conservative perspective) that the party may not win much more than 35% or 36% of the vote on Thursday. If it does worse than this then, yes, Cameron’s critics will consider themselves vindicated and they may have a point. Nevertheless even if we end up considering Project Dave a failure that doesn’t mean an alternative strategy – one that might win support from Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer for instance – would have prevailed or done any better. I suspect it might have done very much worse and that the Conservatives could have been fortunate to win even 30% of the vote in such circumstances.
I am surprised that Mr O’Sullivan continues to insist that Hungary’s recent election offers a useful set of lessons for British conservatives. I agree with him that Hungary’s electoral system is fiercely complicated but in the first round of voting in 2006* Fidesz won slightly more than six million votes and so did the MSZP and, once both rounds had been completed, Fidesz held 164 seats and the MSZP 186.
No matter how you try to interpret these numbers it seems obvious that Fidesz were in a much better position to take advantage of a subsequent collapse in support for the coalition government and that, what with it being a coalition, there were few other options available for protesting voters. By contrast, the Tories are beginning from a position that’s worse than that facing Labour in 1987. Yes, Michael Foot’s Labour party won more seats Michael Howard’s Conservatives. And yet people such as Mr O’Sullivan complain that the Tories aren’t winning “easily”!
He writes: “The comparison is a fair one and underlines that the Tories ‘ought to be winning easily and by a landslide’ over this unpopular Labour government and that they are failing to do so.” But it does no such thing at all. One might as sensibly say that because apples are now more popular than oranges in Hungary so British people should abandon oranges and increase their consumption of apples. And that’s before you even consider that bananas are much more popular in Britain than they are in Hungary.
Recall that as recently as the autumn of 2007 Labour were supposed to call an election that most observers thought they would win easily. It remains puzzling that they did not. It’s true that this helps remind one that Cameronism has shallow roots but I’m not required to think that the modernisers have got everything right to think that their central presumption – that things couldn’t go on like this – was broadly correct.
Two other points: as Daniel Larison points out, unlike Fidesz in Hungary, the Tories supported the Iraq War. Perhaps they were right to do so but, politically, at least, this made it more difficult for them to make much headway against Labour in 2005 and, to some extent, now too. Secondly, the Tories were just as compromised by the expenses scandal as Labour and, in some ways, may have come out of it worse. After all, Labour weren’t by then trying to argue that they were some new kind of party. The scandal, however, dented public confidence in all parties and undermined the Tory message of change. And that’s before you recall that moats and duck houses – Tory excesses – became arguably the dominant image of the scandal.
These factors also help explain, I think, why the Tories are not doing better than they are. But it’s also the case that, say, 37% of the vote today is not what it was a generation or two ago. It used to be that the Tories and Labour between them would win more than 90% of the vote. Their combined share of the vote has been slipping for years and in 2005 it was 67%. The days of winning 47-44 are long gone and unlikely to return. If that’s the case then it makes sense to revise our definition of “success”.
That doesn’t mean that 33% would be a good result for the Conservatives. It would not. It might be terrible and, yes, if that were to happen on Thursday there’d be many questions to ask at Central Office.
Mr O’Sullivan complains that I have caricatured him as “a doctrinaire opponent of all change within Toryism”. I’m not sure that’s what I’ve done but I don’t think it unfair to suggest that Mr O’Sullivan is not a fan of Cameronism. I dare say there are any number of changes Mr O’Sullivan would approve of. Unfortunately those articles never seem to be published and so the poor reader has a rather better idea of what Mr O’Sullivan does not like and very little notion of the change he’d find palatable.
He invites us to believe that the problem is too much modernisation and not enough attention paid to the base. That’s a perfectly respectable point of view but it’s not one I find convincing.
The key metric, anyway, is not so much the Conservatives’ share of the vote as the difference between their share and Labour’s. At present, as I say, the Tories appear to be six or seven points ahead of Labour and, if repeated on Thursday, this would actually mean that Cameron wins the election by the same distance as that by which Mr O’Sullivan’s old boss prevailed in 1979.
Margaret Thatcher beat a tired, exhausted, bankrupt, discredited Labour government by seven points in the popular vote and if the polls are accurate then, in this more politically diverse and fragmented age, it looks as though David Cameron might achieve much the same result. I wouldn’t consider that an appalling failure.
Indeed, the thumping victories of the Thatcher era – a period marked by Labour madness and collapse of course – are very much the exception. If Cameron doesn’t quite manage to equal the 1979 result then he might come close, in terms of beating Labour, to matching Macmillan in 1959 when SuperMac beat Gaitskell by less than 6%.
The answer to the question “Why aren’t the Tories doing better?” might be that “Actually they’re doing better than you might think.” I know this may seem odd but there you have it nonetheless.
One last thing: I suggested that Mr O’Sullivan’s comparison with Hungary was “slippery to the point of being dishonest.” I regret that and apologise to Mr O’Sullivan for the implication therein. I should have simply said, more accurately, “Slippery and misleading.”
*Inserted, as commenters remind me, for clarity.
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