James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
Even the Tories accept that they can’t go like this. For a while, David Cameron thought he could maintain his safety-first strategy and leave Labour to tear itself apart. But with the polls returning to hung parliament territory, the high command now accepts that there is a need for a course correction. This is welcome news. Recognising there is a problem is the first step to recovery.
The problem is that the Tories are barely hitting 40 per cent in the polls despite the fact that they are running against a tired and discredited government led by a man whom most of the Cabinet, let alone the public, can’t abide. The root cause of this problem is that they have no central message. The party’s posters all bear the tagline ‘year for change’. But beyond this, the Tories struggle to explain what change they will bring apart from not being Gordon Brown. Admittedly, the biggest change that the Tories are committed to — their plan to make the workings of government transparent — is inherently abstract. But it is hard to see what the change they are offering is when they are flying off to Davos, signing up the government’s former adviser Lord Stern, committing to carry on with Mr Brown’s style of inflation targeting and promising that any cuts made in 2010-11 will not be ‘particularly extensive’.
By downplaying the cuts, the Tories have given Labour an opening to argue that everyone accepts the deficit is a problem that must be put off for another day. Tory rhetoric about the deficit being a ‘clear and present danger’ to the economy loses its impact when they are going to do so little about it in year one. As one Labour spin doctor said to me gleefully on Monday, after the Tories could only name £1.5 billion that they wouldn’t spend in 2010-11, it stretches credulity to argue that a deficit of £178 billion is a moral failure but one of £176.5 billion is fine.
Something harder is needed. For some time now, George Osborne has been arguing that the party needs a ‘retail offering’ — selling not words like ‘change’ but concrete policies, something to show the public what they will get in return for their vote. This has encountered opposition from Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s closest aide, who is arguing for more vision and less detail. He was working from California when the Obama campaign was at its most impressive, and is said to be pushing for an election fought more on the concept of ‘change’ — which should not be spelled out too clearly. But the problem with this approach is that Cameron, who is trying to become the 19th Old Etonian to become prime minister, cannot embody change in the way that Barack Obama, who was trying to be the first black man elected president, could.
In the last few weeks, Mr Osborne — and his growing number of allies — have been winning the argument. Last weekend, for example, David Cameron announced that a burglar leaves his human rights at the door when he breaks into your house. This was intended as an example of a policy that can be sold on the doorstep: something to sway the voters who believe that voting Tory won’t really change anything. It was also significant that Tory plans to freeze council tax were dusted down and taken for a spin this weekend. This has been Tory policy since it was announced in George Osborne’s 2008 conference speech and Tory candidates say it goes down well. But it is rarely, if ever, emphasised by the party nationally.
Alastair Campbell was fond of saying that the ordinary voters only begin to hear a message when the media is growing sick of it. The Tories have not grasped this. Too often when you ask them why they don’t talk more about a particular policy, they’ll point you to a particular front page or segment on the News at Ten as if that was enough to drum it into voters’ minds. By contrast, Gordon Brown repeats the same messages endlessly.
The current discussion over strategy echoes — in both personnel and seemingly in result — the one that took place before the election that never was in 2007. Then, Mr Osborne told The Spectator that the über-modernisers were wrong and that ‘we have to have something to say’. The Tory conference that followed duly produced a promise to take all estates worth less than a million pounds out of inheritance tax, to abolish stamp duty on properties worth less than a quarter of a million pounds for first-time buyers and plans to let anyone set up a school. This package said enough about the Tories’ fighting spirit to make Gordon Brown call off the election.
Mr Osborne now has two powerful allies arguing for his position: the party’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, and George Bridges, who has recently returned to work for the party. Significantly, Osborne was responsible for hiring both men, who add balance to the Tory top team. Friends of Coulson and Bridges say they have already struck up a strong bond. Unlike some others, they have no desire to distance themselves from the party’s grassroots. Both are also on the right of the party — Coulson is a former tabloid newspaper editor and Bridges in his time away from the party chose to join the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank which regards itself as the keeper of the Thatcherite flame. The pair can be expected to push for a subtle increase in the emphasis on immigration. Coulson is said to favour using Sayeeda Warsi, a second-generation Pakistani immigrant, to turn the volume up on the party’s message on this issue.
Steve Hilton, though, remains the third most important man in the party behind Cameron and Osborne. But he has no desire for a media profile and he remains something of a mystery to many party staffers and nearly all Tory MPs. Those who are close to him are phenomenally loyal, praising him as invigorating and inspirational. But his ideas are often so concentrated that they need to be diluted. For a while, Hilton argued that Cameron’s first Queen’s Speech should contain no bills, to show that the Tories did not think legislation was the answer to the country’s problems.
It is remarkable, given how few people set Tory strategy, how civil things are — you would expect such a small group to be far more fractious. Everyone involved is, needless to say, keen to play down rumours of any kind of row. They were described to me by various senior Tories as ‘bollocks’, ‘total bollocks’ and ‘utter bollocks’. But there are meetings taking place on how the Tories can improve their decision-making.
This election is the Tories’ to lose. There is an increasing danger that they could do just that if they spend all their time trying to stave off Labour attacks. But hopefully the Tories have now got the message that they need a message.
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