‘It’s like the battle of Waterloo,’ one leading Cameroon said to me at the Spectator’s party last night. He meant that nobody knew what the morning would bring, and that once the battle had been joined – in this case a global financial battle between impersonal forces of unimaginable scale – nothing would be the same again.
He was right. One has the sense here at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham of being in an ant colony whose residents have just realised how tiny they really are. This is not a reflection upon the Conservatives, who had a good day yesterday and are running a show as smooth as an Innocent smoothie here. No: the problem is that it is hard to compel media and public interest in the prospective policies of an incoming Tory Government when the Dow is in freefall and the very future of the British banking system is in doubt.
The Cameroons are not unduly concerned by this, irritating as it is to have the carefully planned choreography of many months driven to the margins by a financial hurricane. They know that there are severe limits to what any Opposition can do in a crisis – and that it has more scope for embarrassments and unforced errors than for triumphs. So: expect even sterner faces on the conference platform and sobriety all round, almost to the point of parody. There will, of course, continue to be a sharp critique of Brown’s custody of the economy but also a post 9/11 style promise of bipartisanship. The Tories point to Bush’s talks with senior Democrats and ask why Gordon can’t do the same. Of course, the Tories don’t control the legislature, as the Democrats do in Washington, so the comparison is scarcely exact. But the real reason, as Cameron well knows, is that Brown would rather have his toenails torn out than hold a Labour-Tory summit with the people he calls the ‘public school bullies’.
The next 36 hours are an obstacle course for the Tories, who will lead the news only if they stumble. Welcome to Waterloo.
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