Frontline Tories to Cameron: ‘We don’t want to look nasty and we don’t want to look mad.’

Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership was a help or hindrance.

The broad conclusion was that most marginal MPs took a decidedly and sometimes passionately ‘softline’ position on most controversial issues, European ‘interference’ in domestic human rights questions offering the nearest thing to a hardline consensus. And all considered Mr Cameron a plus, though more weakly in the Midlands and North.

I wrote up my results in some detail, my focus being to make a factual report. But my short interviews had been real conversations rather than just box-ticking: they prompted thoughts and observations that fell outside a survey report. What were they?

First, and overwhelmingly, how astonishingly sane and sensible most backbench Tory MPs are. It may be a cliché to remark that it’s only the troubled or the troublemakers who make the news, but it’s true. Talking to me unattributably, few of my interviewees displayed the posturing certainties that characterise the small band of their colleagues who pop up in reports of Tory divisions. Again and again I encountered the agonised doubt that is the mark of a responsible politician: how do you reconcile what the public demand with what it would be realistic to promise?

Three lessons for the party leadership came through strongly. First, that these MPs are fed up with announcements that fall apart or fizzle out or fade away. ‘No more exaggerated promises’ more or less sums it up. My interviewees described their voters as losing confidence in the link between promise and performance.