Clemency Burtonhill

Cameron is taking on Brown

The party political battle moves to Africa

Nothing much is certain in British politics these days, but assuming that the next general election will pit Gordon Brown against David Cameron, we can be sure of one thing: its result will be a referendum on rebranding. Can the slick young pretender convince the cynics out there that the Conservatives are no longer a party of posh toffs with nasty views on immigration and labour markets? Can the dour old Scot loosen up a bit and stop making the electorate feel so very uncomfortable? Even with a couple of years to go (Brown being increasingly less likely to call a snap election with Labour as much in the doldrums as it is), they’re already at it furiously: Gordon with his intimate interviews and glitterati dinner parties; Dave (whose efforts to rebrand are necessarily more about his party as a whole) with his solar panels and natty webcam, his hoodie love and public support of the NHS.

If opinion polls are to be believed, the latter is currently doing a better job of convincing people that his party can once again be electable than the former is doing of convincing us that he’ll be a viable prime minister. But this is not altogether surprising. What ticket is Brown fighting on? In the tricky compromise he must negotiate between distance (his fingerprints are all over the New Labour steering wheel) and continuity (he’d be ridiculed if he denied it), he will almost certainly create space between himself and the decision to go to war in Iraq, but this will not fool a public who associate Brown as inextricably with Blair as they do Rumsfeld with Bush. Until recently we might have counted on his trumpeting his thrilling decade in the Treasury, but recent soaring inflation and interest rates will have put paid to that.

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