David Cameron’s path towards power has been long and winding, and may twist and turn yet more before the general election. Tony Blair’s march to Number 10 between 1994 and 1997 was relatively linear. Mr Cameron, in contrast, was underdog in his party’s leadership race in 2005, wobbled badly in the summer of 2007, recovered after the election-that-never-was and then faced a resurgent Gordon Brown as the scale of the global downturn became clear last September.
In the course of this political rollercoaster ride, it has been easy to lose sight of what ought to be the most important fact in British politics: namely that Mr Cameron is still likely to be the next Prime Minister. In recent weeks, that likelihood has hardened into high probability, as a string of opinion polls has shown the Tory leader enjoying a steady and substantial lead over Mr Brown — culminating in Tuesday’s Ipsos-Mori survey, which had the Tories on 48 points, with Labour 20 points behind.
It is time, then, to start treating the Conservatives as the supplicant government-in-waiting rather than a revived opposition, and to scrutinise their proposals accordingly. The stakes could scarcely be higher. Whoever enters Number 10 as Prime Minister on the morning after the general election will face a daunting task of economic reconstruction and lead a country whose confidence has been sapped not only by the terrible conse-quences of the crash, but by years of political and social failure, in which the state has grown as national morale has withered. Pragmatism and good intentions will not be enough. This is an hour for the courageous leadership that will make the necessary shock therapy possible and bearable.
Successful opposition leaders are essentially horse whisperers, especially if they lead parties that have been out of power for a long time. Their task is to soothe and reassure the nervous electorate, and this Mr Cameron has done triumphantly, to an extent that many natural Tories still underestimate. That work is not complete, and never can be. Mr Cameron must, as Peter Mandelson would put it, ‘punch the bruise’ of the electorate’s doubts, assuaging them until the last vote is cast, and beyond.
But a prospective Prime Minister must be more than a horse whisperer, especially in times of turbulence. He must also be a confident horseman, able to handle his mount and coax it over the most forbidding obstacles. Mr Cameron has made his name as an appealing, steady, likeable Tory centrist. The question for the electorate is whether there is more to him than that.
There is growing evidence that, within his recycled trainers, the Conservative leader’s toes twitch with nervous energy: that he may be a closet radical. This week’s Tory green paper on local government did not satisfy the most ardent localists and Simon Jenkins was certainly right in Wednesday’s Guardian that when politicians use the word ‘localism’ we should ‘count the spoons’. The package of Tory proposals does not resolve the fundamental problem of local governance in this country, which is that our town halls are completely dependent upon central government: 75 per cent of the money spent locally comes from the Treasury, the most centralised system of local government finance in Europe other than Ireland’s.
Nonetheless, the ending of Whitehall capping powers and the introduction of local referendums to enable residents to overturn bad budgets would be a very desirable transference of financial control from the mandarin to the man in the street. The removal of disincentives to build houses, the devolution of planning power, the plans to plough the fruits of local businesses back into the community, the proposed statutory presumption enabling town halls to act in the best interests of their voters, even if no specific legislation supports their actions: all these measures, if matched by serious political will, would be significant steps towards the growth of a genuine localist culture.
The Spectator has pressed, and will continue to press, for more grammar schools. But the Conservatives’ plan to adopt the Swedish model of independent schools, enabling parents, voluntary groups and businesses to establish their own educational establishments funded by vouchers, is a truly radical blueprint which we support wholeheartedly. The Swedish experiment has shown how the liberalisation of public services can triumph where top-down, centralised bureaucracies and targets have failed.
On the family, Mr Cameron is much more radical than his recent predecessors, daring to state explicitly what is empirically obvious: that the family is the fundamental building-block of any social order and requires unambiguous support from government. On the Broken Society, he has faced down those in his party nervous of speaking the truth about welfare dependency, addiction, dysfunctional families and forgotten communities.
When he drops his guard, Mr Cameron is the opposite of cautious. It probably suited him in his first incarnation — rebuilder of the Conservative party — to appear instinctively cautious and untainted by ideological fervour. But now the electorate will be looking at him — in many cases for the first time — as a prospective Prime Minister and, specifically, the leading candidate to steer the nation through what will undoubtedly be dire economic challenges.
Bit by bit, Mr Cameron is assembling a portfolio of policy proposals which could, if enacted with vigour, transform the country. But radical policy papers are not enough. Countenance matters as much as content, especially in an hour of public anxiety. It is time for Mr Cameron to act with the urgency, impatience and authority of a leader in a hurry: a statesman-in-waiting who, on behalf of the country, is banging on the door of Number 10 every day and telling Mr Brown that his time is up.
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