James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
The worst thing about this week for Gordon Brown is that no one has bothered to dub it his worst week ever. Normally, a few days which saw a Prime Minister receive the succession of blows that Brown has suffered since Saturday would lead to forests being chopped down and extra barrels of newsprint being ordered in. But we have now reached a political moment where it can be revealed that the government is reduced to querying David Cameron’s name when it appears on Number 10 party guest lists, a key government policy adviser defects to the Tories, someone ‘quite close to the inner core’ (rumoured to be Harriet Harman) floats the idea that Brown will quit to go and head up a new international body, and the Tories open up a 20-point poll lead — and it is treated as business pretty much as usual. Even the obvious tension between Peter Mandelson’s comments in a speech in New York on Tuesday that governments must not ‘be pushed into hurried judgments’ on bankers’ bonuses, and the Chancellor’s hurried announcement on the very same topic, failed to attract much attention.
This lack of interest is explained by the fact that nearly everyone in Westminster now thinks this government is done. On the Tory side, the conversation is all about how they should run things in office, and whether Tony Blair went too far or not far enough in politicising the government machine. On the Labour side, it is about where the party should go in the leadership election that will follow the coming defeat. Brown, to borrow a phrase used by another former chancellor, is in office but not in power.
So quickly are the tectonic plates shifting that even Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary who was permanent secretary at the Treasury for much of Brown’s chancellorship, is apparently letting it be known that his time at Number 10 has persuaded him of the need for radical reform of the way government works.
When David Cameron kisses hands at Buckingham Palace and is asked to form a government, he will be inheriting not only a broken society but a busted economy and a military that has been running hot for almost a decade. The gravity of the situation, which is putting a dampener on the Tory mood far more effectively than the champagne ban did at the party’s conference in Birmingham, means that Cameron — for good or ill — will be a consequential prime minister: of necessity, what he does will matter enormously. The Macmillan-with-trainers option is now off the table.
Cameron will go into government without at least one of his three key advisers. Andy Coulson, the party’s media man whose hand could be seen behind the recent reshuffle, has long made clear that his job will be done when the Tories are elected. Another, Steve Hilton, the party’s chief strategist, is also thought not to be keen to work full-time in Downing Street, and he already spends much of his time in California. Their departure would boost the importance of the third member of this trio, George Osborne.
Even Cameron’s closest supporters didn’t expect him to be a transformative prime minister when he ran for the party leadership in 2005. Rather like George W. Bush in 2000, he was elected to take the edge off his party’s image and address issues like education and social breakdown that the Tories had traditionally neglected while not scaring the voters with any radical talk. But, just as Bush had 9/11, so Cameron has been confronted with an economic crisis of unknowable depth and duration.
Unlike Bush, the Tory leader at least has the advantage of time to prepare for his challenge. It is already clear what the defining policy decision of the first term will be: how to share the cost of the recession between tax rises and spending cuts (the very reverse of the distributive choice the Tories thought they were going to have to make with the expected ‘proceeds of growth’). Already, there are rumours about who stands where, with Ken Clarke suspected of favouring raising taxes.
But all these arguments about personalities ignore the role of the new institution the Tories plan to set up: the Office of Budget Responsibility. Derided as a gimmick when it was announced at party conference, the OBR could turn out to be a domestic IMF: a body that can order the fiscal policies that are necessary but politically too unpopular for any politician to advocate. Because the OBR has not existed before, it has never been defied before. If Cameron wants cover for a bold solution rather than a political sticking plaster, then the OBR could provide it. The key is to find a person to head it of sufficient stature to give it the authority it needs. The problem is that, post-credit crunch, there are few people of seniority in the fields of economics and finance who have clean hands.
Next month, the shadow Cabinet will start sitting down with Cameron and the Implementation Unit, an internal group which examines how policies devised in opposition will work in government, to discuss their plans. A blunt assessment of where the party stands is that in an awful lot of areas there is an awful lot of work to be done. Education, which Cameron now routinely describes as his first priority after the economy, is the closest to having a fully developed policy, the Swedish-inspired idea to allow the creation of free but state-funded schools run by teachers rather than bureaucrats and accountable to parents rather than politicians. The policy also has the significant advantage in these straitened times of not having any up-front capital costs.
But elsewhere policy is either underdeveloped or needs adjusting for the new realities. For example, can the party fulfil its pledge to stop the early release of prisoners given the huge capital costs of building new prisons and the fact that crime usually rises during recessions? On the NHS, is it really practical to promise to add to £90 billion-plus of public spending when the next government might have to cut as much as £100 billion from the government spending total of £623 billion?
Encouragingly, the leadership seems aware of the areas where policy and personnel need beefing up. The recruitment of David Freud to the Tory side to implement welfare reform was one such recognition. The foreign policy team might be the next to receive some additions.
The way in which the Tories launch themselves in office is even more important than it would normally be for an incoming government, because they won’t have a Blair- or Obama-style honeymoon. The Cameroons will be forming a government in dire circumstances: official statistics indicate that unemployment will peak at 3.5 million about six months into a Tory government, a challenge not even Margaret Thatcher had to confront. To earn the time they’ll need to turn the situation around they must make a very competent start. They cannot afford any of the usual Tory cock-ups.
As well as preparing for government, Cameron must prepare the country for his premiership. Transformative leaders — and this is what circumstances dictate Cameron must be — show their countries where they are leading them. Cameron must bring together the Tory’s policies on the economy, schools, energy and localism and craft them into something larger than the sum of their parts. His message must have the same kind of clear vision that Reagan’s and Thatcher’s had. This is no time for a gradualist.
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