It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong.
It isn’t often that political commentary presents us with a perfect portrait — a neat and simple miniature in oils — of where a faction is going wrong. Just such a picture, however, was painted unwittingly for us by Tim Montgomerie in the Telegraph last Sunday.
Tim Montgomerie is an admirable and capable figure, and co-editor of ConservativeHome. Without him the world of political commentary would lose one of its most interesting and significant voices on the right. Never unheeding, never unthinking and never unarmed, he’s a formidable protagonist.
But nobody should confuse Tim with the whatever’s-best-for-our-great-party Conservative loyalist that he sometimes seems to present himself as being; and it worries me that many Conservative voters and Tory party members do suppose him and his website to represent a sort of neutral observation platform for Tory-minded folk. Given the bleak picture they are shown from this platform, they wonder what can be going so wrong.
As a fellow columnist familiar with the drafting arts, I detect an agenda. The tendency Tim and his people represent do not, in their heart, like David Cameron. They don’t like what he stands for. They don’t want his brand of Conservatism to win. Should he ever sink, they’ll imply they always told us so. But they don’t quite tell us so. Instead there’s a gentle but steady drizzle of faintly unhelpful commentary, punctuated by an occasional reference to Cameron’s merits — for balance, and lest we think they’ve closed their minds.
I was, then, more depressed than surprised to see that weekend newspaper piece, misleadingly headlined ‘Top ten mistakes of David Cameron’. Misleadingly, because the list turned out to have been compiled on the basis of a ‘survey of 1,500 Tory members’. The survey was worth conducting, but perhaps more for what it said about the Tory grass roots than about the Prime Minister.
Before I indicate what the survey found, try reversing the polarities. Suppose the item had appeared in the Guardian during Tony Blair’s prime-ministership, had been headlined ‘Top ten mistakes of Tony Blair’ and had described what Labour party activists thought were Mr Blair’s mistakes. After wondering why Labour’s core supporters had been given the role of nominating the PM’s mistakes, you’d have read on, muttering ‘No doubt they think he’s not left-wing enough. Let’s hope he takes no notice of them.’
Well, here’s what core Tory supporters think Cameron has done wrong, in brutal summary: 1) No referendum on Lisbon Treaty. 2) Wrongheaded support for ‘green’ policies. 3) Compromising on NHS reforms. 4) ‘Flirting’ (Tim’s word) with sentencing reforms. 5) Showcasing ‘Big Society’ ideas. 6 )‘Opposing’ (Tim’s word) grammar schools. 7) Not vetoing Nick Clegg’s participation in the TV election debates. 8) Not making defence spending a priority. 9) Downplaying immigration as an election issue. 10) Supporting (in opposition) Labour’s spending plans.
In other words, Cameron’s ‘top mistakes’ have been to be a bunny-hugging, prisoner-loving Euro-softie social bien-pensant who thinks again about policies the voters hate, declines to bring back the 11-plus, lets his opponents on to TV, fails to ramp up defence spending, shies away from immigrant-bashing and was gutless enough not to fight the last election on a promise to slash health and welfare. What a pity the list was limited to ten pet hates. Had it been 20 we could have reprised hanging, national service, sodomy laws, corporal punishment, the abolition of the BBC, a cut in child benefit to pay for a new royal yacht, a property-based voting franchise, abolition of the minimum wage and a return to the good old-fashioned use of the word ‘gay’.
I caricature. I really do, because I don’t recognise the identikit Tory suggested by Tim’s list in the many party members I know, predominantly in rural England. But let us for a moment assume (what we should not assume) that Tory members would overwhelmingly support a manifesto of the kind that list calls to mind. And let us assume further (as we cannot) that not only are these their own political preferences, but also their considered opinion as to the best way for a Conservative leader to win the support of floating voters. What then do we have?
We have the Conservative version of Michael Foot’s Labour party. Cling on to your hard-core supporters, making sure not to alienate them. Perhaps wisely, the Conservatives in their coldest winters under William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard clung on in this way. But it was only when the weather changed and David Cameron dared to break out of the stockade that the party’s fortunes began to pick up. Poll after poll showed him to be more popular than his own party. It would be madness for him to abandon that strategy now.
Tim wants the party to return to the stockade. He is not so stupid as to call this a ‘core vote strategy’, which might suggest a paring down of support. Instead, he seems to believe the rest of the country would be hammering on the stockade’s walls to get in, too, if only Cameron and his colleagues returned there.
Before you join any such migration, reflect on the fact that this was precisely what Michael Foot believed, and Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone still believe: that a party does not win or keep support by allowing itself to be distracted by outsider-ideas, or diluted by the tides of fashionable opinion. ‘We are at our best when we are most Labour,’ said Gordon Brown. A party should heed its own internal prophets, its ancient household gods. To win, you do not look out, you look in.
It’s a lovely thought. And it’s bonkers. Today Britain’s most prominent Montgomerie-ite is not Montgomerie at all. It’s Ed Balls. They’re well matched: two clever, spirited men, determined and confident enough not to be distracted by the age they live in.
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