Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Very discreetly, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech

In spite of their commanding poll lead, the Tories are terrified of seeming complacent. But, as Fraser Nelson discloses, work is well advanced on a first-term plan for government in which education reform and a welfare revolution will be the centrepieces

At 9 p.m. on the night before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he was lying alone on his bed staring at the ceiling. He didn’t want to join his family, watching television, but was eventually dragged down for the News at Ten. ‘No,’ he said, when he heard its exit poll. ‘I accept that we’re going to win, but a landslide? It’s ridiculous.’ This anecdote, recounted in his wife’s autobiography, dramatises what those around David Cameron consider Blair’s worst mistake: a failure to prepare (in Labour’s case, for the sheer scale of victory). It is an error they are determined not to repeat.

Not that Mr Cameron expects a landslide. And he, too, has a near-superstitious aversion to the merest whiff of triumphalism. The electorate, he says, will rightly punish anyone who takes them for granted. But the Tory leader has been persuaded that a greater arrogance is to seek power and not to prepare for it. After all: every recent opinion poll suggests that the Conservatives are on course for (at the very least) a decent working majority in the Commons. So already, work has started on what would be the Cameron government’s first Queen’s Speech.

The general trajectory is already fairly clear. A post-Brown Conservative government would be explicitly pro-family and aim to reduce the welfare rolls. It would take a more ‘holistic’ approach to poverty, insisting that progressive ends are best achieved by conservative means. More power would be transferred to local communities — notably by the election of local police chiefs. When possible, taxes would be cut. This is the fairly familiar tune, piped out routinely in Cameroon speeches.

The question is: how, and in what order? My conversations with the key players in the preparation strategy suggest unambiguously that schools reform and an overhaul of the welfare system will be the priorities — the hope being that both undertakings will have yielded palpable interim results which will help Mr Cameron secure a second term.

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