No more Mr Nice Guy

Smile and shoeshine get you only so far in any business, says Irwin Stelzer. But Labour is still vulnerable if the Tory leader produces solid conservative policies

David Cameron is confused. Understandably. For two reasons. First, those who are urging him to abandon policy-lite in favour of more heft are the very same who favour policies that would lead to disaster at the polls. The result is confusion between the need to reject the specific policies they propose, and the need to offer voters something more than a smile and shoeshine, to borrow from Arthur Miller.

There are, after all, policies and there are policies. There are policies based on Euro- paranoia, and policies that reflect a healthy scepticism of the emerging European superstate. There are mean policies that aim to take revenge on single mums and others dependent on the state, and there are compassionate policies that aim to assist them to end reliance on handouts. There are proposals that blindly call for tax cuts, and there are proposals that would gear the level of taxes to the nation’s economic circumstances, distinguish between sensible and inefficient taxes, and not blindly assume that any and all tax cuts will result in economic instability.

In short, the Tory leader can safely end his smile-and-shoeshine period — which did, after all, get him in the door, as it did Miller’s poor Willy Loman — without travelling the road to another electoral disaster. Like Loman, Cameron will come up empty unless he has a decent product to sell now that he has succeeded in obtaining a hearing from his potential customers.

Second, as he returns from holiday and surveys the political scene, he will notice that his calculation that Gordon Brown’s often less-than-genial personality would make him a pushover for any ‘heir to Blair’ has been consigned to the dustbin of history.