The Conservatives have proved unafraid of making enemies with their cuts. It’s less clear that they know who their friends are
With all the spending review figures published, one question still hangs in the air: whose side is the coalition on? Families with teenagers? No, they’ll be hit by higher university fees. Families where the single earner brings home more than £45,000? No, they’ll lose child benefit. High earners? There’s the new 50p tax for them. The public sector? With all those job cuts, that’s a sick joke. The armed forces? Unlikely, after the hatchet job on the defence budget. Commuters? No, it’s higher fares for them. If Ed Miliband were looking for an aggrieved section of the electorate to champion, this spending review has left him spoiled for choice.
One can argue that the government can’t afford friends, because we have an Everest-sized deficit. Credible action demands pollarding the state, not just pruning. And we must also consider the nature of this coalition. It’s difficult to stand up for any one group when you have to hold together a government representing everyone from the nuclear-disarming, American-sceptic, Europhile Lib Dem left to the ‘let’s bomb Iran’, Eurosceptic, hang-’em-and-flog-’em Conservative right. But the government does still need to know whose side it’s on.
The denizens of Downing Street will reach for their polls, and at present the picture looks rather bleak for the Tories. A recent YouGov poll asked voters whether they thought that the Conservatives were close to particular groups in society. After five years of Conservative attempts (mine included) to shift the perception of the party, the results are sobering. Eight out of ten people think that the party is close to the rich, businessmen and the City. Seven out of ten think Conservatives are close to people in the South.
As for being close to Northerners, the working-class, women, people with families and older people, the Conservatives got the thumbs down. It is a poll to make Ed Miliband’s heart leap: here is his ready-made Tory-sceptic constituency, largely in Northern seats, waiting for a reason to vote Labour. The sole glimmer of light in the polling is that the Conservatives are regarded as being the friends of homeowners and, in particular, the ‘middle class’ — that lumpen chunk of Britain that Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair seemed to ‘get’ instinctively.
Understanding the middle class is the quality that distinguishes the great prime minister from the good. Sitting in the flat above the No. 10 office, having to make a judgment call that will touch millions of people, a PM might have just a handful of advisers to consult. This is when one needs an idea of — and empathy with — the people you are there to protect, and whose ambitions and hopes you want to see become reality. You need to understand not just how their heads work, but what makes their hearts tick. You need to know, then, who your people are.
Herein lies the danger for the Conservatives. We may be in need of wartime austerity today, but one day the so-called ‘war’ will end and we will need to win the peace. I hope there is someone among the Prime Minister’s praetorian guard who whispers daily to him, ‘Remember, Prime Minister, the coalition is mortal’. To win an election when the chainsaws have stopped their work, Conservatives will need a sharply focused strategy, built on rock-solid conviction.
Sceptics — and there are a few — may scoff. Convictions? Cameron? Having worked with the Prime Minister on and off for the past decade, I am in a better position than most to vouch that he is blue-blooded: Conservatism courses through his veins. We saw a little of it when he talked about the ‘deserving’ — those in society who need help, as opposed to those who don’t. They are the people motivated by a sense of self-help, enterprise, charity and community. Yes, the grand doyennes of Hampstead may snipe that this is a ‘return to Victorian values’. But, to them, I quote John Prescott: it is ‘traditional values in a modern setting’.
Articulating such guiding principles is not just desirable, but essential. The coalition may have convinced many that the Conservatives have changed for the better, but the Conservatives still lag behind Labour when people are asked who is ‘for ordinary people, not just the better off?’ Yes, it’s just a poll, but even a straw in the wind tells you something. The danger is that Labour’s new leader sees this chink, and exploits it mercilessly. ‘A cabinet of millionaires’, trumping the coalition’s attacks on the banks, attacking student fees, lampooning cuts to child benefit — the signs are already there that Ed Miliband ‘gets it’. If he succeeds in turning the fabled middle class into the ‘Mili-class’, the Conservatives will enjoy just one term of government. And much will be left undone. That is a fate Britain does not deserve.
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