Shortly after he arrived in Downing Street as the chief political strategist, Andrew Cooper sent David Cameron a memo about the nation’s hopes and fears.
Shortly after he arrived in Downing Street as the chief political strategist, Andrew Cooper sent David Cameron a memo about the nation’s hopes and fears. Cooper’s research showed that voters’ greatest concern was that their children wouldn’t have the opportunities they’d had. The mood of pessimism in the country, he concluded, could not be lifted until this question was addressed. This is why the conference this week has featured lots of of talk about children and ‘inter-generational fairness’.
‘Inter-generational fairness’ sounds like the sort of meaningless phrase that only a politician would use, but both parties believe that the idea is vital to their prospects. Cameron is eager to show that his government will, as he put it in his conference speech, ‘give our children the future we want them to have’. Ed Miliband, meanwhile, wants to attack the coalition for betraying the promise that every generation will do better than the last.
In Manchester this week, the Tories have been busy presenting deficit reduction as a matter of inter-generational fairness. In their speeches, both Cameron and Osborne stressed that the country couldn’t leave this debt crisis to its children.
This language is intended, in large part, to tackle another problem, the party’s falling ratings among women. Women have traditionally voted Tory in greater numbers than men, but they are being turned off the party by the cuts and the fall in living standards. Since July last year, the Tories have only lost 4 per cent of their male support. Among women, the number is 19 per cent. For a party that has never won a general election without a majority among female voters, that is a serious concern.
Cameron’s circle have concluded they must persuade female voters that the cuts aren’t ideological, nor an act of political machismo, but motivated by the need not to pass on crippling debts to the next generation. ‘Women view themselves as the guarantors of the inter-generational contract,’ one Conservative minister says.
This view is widely shared at the top of the party. One strategist observes that, while men are impressed by talk of having a plan and sticking to it, women are not. ‘We need to put the core argument about deficit reduction in terms that connect with women,’ he says.
This is not the only thing that the Tories are doing in an attempt to win back female support. In the next few weeks, they will announce a new policy under which families can write off some of the costs of childcare against tax. George Osborne, indeed, would like to go further: his ambition is to make childcare fully tax-deductible. A family that spent £20,000 a year on a nanny would be able to reduce the portion of their income subject to tax by that amount. Before the last election, his team did extensive work on this idea, without ever managing to make the numbers add up. But getting it to work remains a priority ahead of the next election — partly because it could yield significant economic benefits by encouraging female graduates back into the workforce, and partly because it would be such an attractive way to outflank Labour. How could Ed Miliband oppose a tax cut that would help mothers go back to work? ‘We need a game-changer when it comes to women,’ says one source close to the Chancellor. ‘And this could be it.’
Policy, however, is only part of the problem. Tories also see that they need to recast Cameron’s image to appeal to women again. In a pre-conference interview with the Sunday Times, Cameron went out of his way to apologise to women for patronising comments he has made to female MPs in the House of Commons. The press pack at conference, a heavily male group which tends to believe that politicians should never apologise and never explain, saw this as a sign of weakness. The Cameron operation, on the other hand, was quietly satisfied, believing that the air needed clearing and that women would appreciate the apology even if ‘Westminster males’ didn’t.
Ed Miliband’s team still think that they have an opportunity to woo women voters. They say that while Cameron went to an all-boys’ school then joined an all-male dining society at Oxford and now has an inner circle dominated by men from similar backgrounds, Miliband went to a co-ed school and has an office in which the most powerful figures are women. Miliband does seem more comfortable with women than men. He was never one for the boozy, laddish culture of New Labour. One can follow him round a party by the trail of untouched drinks that he leaves behind.
Set against this is the fact that Miliband didn’t put his name on his first child’s birth certificate. Irritatingly for him — and rather unfairly given the circumstances — this is one of the few facts about him that has lodged in the public’s consciousness.
The nature of the Cameron circle is also changing. Up to now, Kate Fall has been an isolated female voice at the top table. But his press secretary Gabby Bertin is becoming an increasingly important strategic voice. The apology to women is said to have been her idea.
If Cameron is going to win the majority his party yearns for, he will have to work out what women want. If he can’t, he’ll be stuck in a boys’ club with Nick Clegg forever.
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