On Monday night, a Tory donor spent £90,000 on a bust of David Cameron at the party’s summer ball. It was an encouraging sign that there are still Conservatives prepared to lavish money and praise on the Prime Minister, and a reminder that the Tories will be able to run an extremely well- funded campaign at the next election.
Another source of comfort for the Prime Minister is the stability of his great political love, the coalition. Those close to him are giddily confident that the government will make it all the way to May 2015. One minister boasts, ‘I’m absolutely certain of it.’
This uptick in confidence is a result of the successful, and relatively stress-free, conclusion of the spending round. The further fiscal tightening that George Osborne announced on Wednesday will see this government through to the election. Gone is the danger that a minister would quit over cuts. To many in Downing Street, this means that the threat posed by Vince Cable to the durability of the coalition has now passed.
Not all Tories share the Cameroon certainty that it will go the distance. Various senior backbenchers have impressed on Lynton Crosby their concern that the Liberal Democrats will walk out a few months before the election over an issue that casts the Tories in the worst —possible light. Crosby has told them that he understands their fears. He knows that in his native Australia the Greens ended their formal alliance with Labor in February ahead of this September’s elections. Indeed, a growing number of Tory MPs favour what they call a ‘reverse Rose Garden’: a joint Cameron-Clegg press conference in autumn next year formally bringing the coalition to an end.
But for the moment, Tory backbenchers are quiescent. They’ve been lifted by signs that the economy is improving and a collective sense that Labour is beatable. Another factor pushing them back towards the leadership is that few wish to be associated with the embarrassingly juvenile ‘alternative Queen’s Speech’ presented by four of Cameron’s most extreme backbench critics. One secretary of state declares, ‘The opposition within and the opposition without have both shown their hands. As a result, they’ve ended up weaker and made the government stronger.’
This outbreak of peace is disconcerting those charged by No. 10 with keeping the parliamentary party on board. They’ve taken to sliding up to people and asking, ‘It all seems very calm — or are we missing something?’
There is one issue on the horizon that will cause trouble between Cameron and his party. It seems almost certain that the coalition will keep Britain in the European arrest warrant. This will not go down well with Eurosceptic backbenchers. One senior figure complains, ‘It allows a Belgian magistrate to sign a warrant for your arrest. It comes to the heart of what the difference between co-operation and integration is.’ The decision to remain inside this system will be seen as another sign that Mr Cameron’s idea of renegotiation is very different to what his party understands by the term.
When the coalition is stable, the focus shifts inevitably on to Labour. Ed Miliband has, in recent weeks, attempted to yank his party into a stronger position on the economy. He’s tried to move the argument beyond Tory cuts versus Labour borrowing by accepting the coalition’s current spending limits.
Miliband’s repositioning poses a challenge for the Tories. They can either say that they’ve won the argument, that Miliband and Balls have been forced into intellectual surrender. Or they can argue that it’s still the ‘same old Labour’ and that these pledges simply aren’t credible. But they can’t do both.
The Tories have chosen the latter strategy. At a recent seminar for Tory candidates in target seats, it was emphasised that they must stress that Labour’s promises of fiscal rectitude are ‘not believable’.
The Tories faces a similar dilemma in terms of their personal attacks on Miliband. As one senior Tory put it to one of the candidates present, ‘Ed Miliband can’t be a bastard who killed his brother, and weak too.’ Tory focus groups show that the charge that Miliband is weak resonates, so they’ve decided to stop talking about the fratricide. Although given how much Cameron relishes bringing up the elder Miliband at PMQs, it remains to be seen if Tory discipline can hold on this point.
But Miliband still has work to do. His first problem is making sure his frontbenchers don’t pledge to reverse this or that cut. Tory researchers will be combing through every utterance of the shadow cabinet looking for unfunded spending commitments.
Then there is the trouble with his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls. The difficulty that Balls poses for Miliband is twofold. First, he can’t stop himself from arguing about the past. After his recent speech announcing that the next Labour government would have to display ‘iron discipline’ on spending, Balls was asked about the record of the last Labour government. He said, ‘Do I think the last Labour government was profligate, spent too much, had too much national debt? No, I don’t think there’s any evidence for that.’ Tory strategists couldn’t believe their luck. By repeating the charges on camera and then denying them, Balls had just cut their first campaign video. He had also undermined the strategic attempt to show that the two Eds understand that the next Labour government can’t spend like the last one.
The other difficulty posed by Balls is perhaps even more insurmountable: his scepticism towards Miliband’s talk of a new economy based around a more responsible capitalism. This is a real problem, because it is Miliband’s answer to how Labour can create a fairer society without the government simply spending more and more money. For example, rather than the Treasury handing out tax credits to support the low paid, as happened under New Labour, Miliband wants to put pressure on companies to pay their workers a living wage.
Miliband’s intellectual allies admit that the Labour leader is making a complicated argument. But it is for this reason that he needs support from his colleagues. At the moment, responsible capitalism is fast becoming Miliband’s big society: a potentially popular idea that is never explained properly. The leader keeps going on about it while his colleagues desperately try to talk about other things. If Miliband wants to know how an undefined big idea fares in an election campaign, he just needs to look at Cameron’s attempt to sell the big society on the doorstep in 2010.
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