James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
‘He who controls the past, controls the future’ as George Orwell reminded us. This means that a battle breaks out in every party after every election to explain the result, to determine which policies helped and which policies hindered. Win or lose, the various factions inside parties race to establish a narrative that is helpful to their cause.
Straight after Labour’s landslide win in 1997, it was declared that ‘we campaigned as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour’. The Blairites were so eager to establish this point that they even considered putting it into the Queen’s speech. The message to the left of the party was clear: the massive majority was a result of the new outlook that Tony Blair had imposed on the party and in government there would be no going back to the party’s traditional positions.
If David Cameron has kissed the Queen’s hand by the time you read this (The Spectator went to press with the result hideously uncertain), he will be tempted to deliver his own version of this message. Cameron ran for the leadership in 2005 on the slogan ‘change to win’. His supporters will be keen to hail any victory as vindication of the Cameron project. He will wish to say, ‘We changed, and we won.’ The implication will be ‘stick with me, I’m a winner and if we lurch to the right, we’ll lose’.
Disgruntled backbenchers also have their counter-narrative ready: Labour’s failures meant that this was an election the Tory party should have won comfortably. For the race to be so close is an indictment of the modernising strategy. The party won the economic battle with Labour in the opening days of the campaign thanks to a classic Conservative argument: don’t put up taxes, cut wasteful spending instead. Then the Liberal Democrats surged until Cameron hit Clegg in the final debate over his support for entry into the euro, an amnesty for illegal immigrants and putting VAT on new homes. This, along with Gordon Brown’s dismissal of voters concerned about immigration as ‘bigots’, was what won it, they’ll say. They will use this to maintain that traditional Tory arguments on tax, Europe and immigration win votes, not husky-hugging and grandiose declarations about the Big Society.
Both arguments contain some truth. If Cameron had not gone out of his way at the beginning of his leadership to demonstrate that he was a different kind of Conservative, then his robust language on immigration in the final debate might have prompted a backlash. It is also worth remembering that during the first debate, which triggered the Lib Dem surge, Cameron sounded like just another Tory leader. He didn’t even mention the Big Society agenda. Indeed, he said nothing that you would not expect a traditional Tory leader to say. There were — to use the phrase beloved of the modernisers — ‘no counterintuitive change messages’. But there’s no denying that the leadership’s desire at the beginning of the year to talk about immigration as little as possible was a political misjudgment. It might have been catastrophic had it not been for Mrs Duffy’s intervention.
The great achievement of Cameron’s leadership to date has been realising that the Thatcherite and One Nation traditions of the party were not contradictory but complementary — for example, he grasped that the best way to improve the life chances of poor children was a supply-side revolution in education. The much-derided ‘Big Society’ agenda is a product of that understanding, a massive programme of social renewal that does not rely exclusively on the state. But the task facing Cameron now is to combine his style of conservatism with his party’s core beliefs.
Cameron also needs to change the way he deals with his parliamentary party. As one senior member of it warns, ‘you can’t carry the party along with you while being distant, not consulting and not talking to people.’ To put it simply, Cameron and his team ‘can’t be cliquey any more’. He also needs to understand where his party is. In private, Cameron still talks of ‘the right’. As one shadow Cabinet member jokes, ‘He calls it the right, I call it the party.’
The campaign has highlighted the insular nature of the Cameron operation. Talk to Tory big beasts and their most frequent complaint is that their telephone calls have not been returned. Alarmingly few people were kept in the loop during the campaign. I’m told that even the ‘deputy in all but name’ William Hague was not properly informed before Cameron announced that any Prime Minister who took over in the mid-term would have to go to the country in six months.
Cameron must make a concerted effort to reach out to his colleagues. There are normally around 20 votes a week in the Commons. Cameron should view each of them as a chance to cruise the tea-room, say hello to a backbencher or junior minister, and in general make new friends.
Whatever arguments follow the election on the Tory side will be mild compared to the one that is about to explode on the Labour side. Almost everyone now accepts that there’ll be a Labour leadership contest following the election and it promises to be as bitter as any of the Tory ones during their wilderness years. When I mentioned to one Labour figure that Ed Balls might lose his seat and so not be able to run for the leadership, I was met with the reply, ‘I hope he doesn’t. It’s crucial that he runs and is absolutely f***ing destroyed.’
Tensions are so high because trust between the various factions has broken down completely. When a report appeared in a Conservative-supporting Sunday newspaper that Peter Mandelson was trying to have David Miliband crowned leader without a contest — an idea sure to start a mutiny in a party that hasn’t had a leadership contest for 16 years and is living with the consequences — many on the Labour side instantly suspected foul play by Ed Balls’s camp. The story was reminiscent of the days of Damian McBride when Tory-leaning newspapers were used to flush out enemies of Brown and Balls. Meanwhile, Balls himself has been complaining in an interview with the New Statesman that it is ‘cowardly and pathetic for people who you might think would have more confidence and integrity to tell right- of-centre columnists things they wouldn’t be able to say in public’.
As well as personal animus there are substantial differences about policy. To the reformers on both the left and the right of the Labour party, the last 13 years have shown that top-down statist methods cannot create the society that they want. But to Balls and the other Fabian centralisers, the key dividing line in politics remains ‘investment’ versus ‘cuts’, with everything else an afterthought. There are also deep differences about how — and whether — to deal with the Lib Dems.
This general election was always going to be the most significant one since 1983. It has also turned out to be the least predictable in living memory. The physical constants of British politics have been altered by this election. How things settle will be determined, in large part, by who wins these arguments over the next few months.
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