Well! Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian was impressed by David Cameron’s conference speech and no mistake.
The campaign for 2015 has begun. On Wednesday, in what may well have been his sharpest, most effective speech since becoming prime minister, David Cameron fired the starting gun. In the process, he lodged at least a couple of deadly bullets into the flesh of his Labour opponents. The result – whatever the polls might say – is that after a fortnight of duelling party conferences, Cameron’s Conservative troops believe they are marching towards a contest in which they now hold the advantage.
That’s partly down to what the prime minister did in Birmingham. But it owes just as much to what Ed Miliband failed to do a week ago. Indeed, the two are intimately linked. For Cameron’s speech was like a finely glazed, elegantly decorated doughnut: it was constructed around a gaping hole, namely the gap left for him by the Labour leader last week.
At which point Freedland tears into the hapless Ed. OK, so he doesn’t use that adjective, but it could have been invented for the Labour leader. And the thing about hapless politicians is that they tend not to win elections even if their party is ahead in the polls. And one reason for this is that they embarrass their supporters, especially those who write columns read by the party faithful.
Now Freedland is careful to say that Dave’s sums don’t add up and that Ed Miliband would have provoked ‘howls of derision’ if he’d promised those tax cuts without explaining how he’d pay for them. But you can’t really go after the PM for ‘forgetting’ the deficit when the Leader of the Opposition literally forgot the deficit in his speech.
Also, Freedland remembers – with unprecedented clarity for a Guardian columnist – that Labour built up that whopping deficit (even if he doesn’t think it should shoulder all the blame). And he reckons Cameron may have mapped out a route for the Tories through the NHS minefield.
Perhaps it’s unintended, but the article seems to hint to the Guardian’s centrist readers that, come the election, it might just be OK to vote for Cameron so long as you do so discreetly. I mean, look at the distance that’s opened up between the Tories and Ukip this week. As James Forsyth observed in his brilliant analysis of the Tory conference:
On the fringe and in the bars there has been far less sympathy for Ukip than there was last year. The desire for a pact that was so frequently expressed the last time the Tories gathered together has been replaced by a desire to beat them.
And this despite the fact that it’s clearer than ever that Dave will neither seek nor achieve a serious renegotiation of our relationship with the EU. He’ll give Britons the opportunity to leave, which – alas – they will turn down: it’s too scary a step. Which is reassuring for middle-of-the-road Guardian types.
The Tory Right likes to argue that Cameron and clan were signing the Conservatives’ death warrant by chasing the votes of people who’d never vote for them anyway. But metropolitan liberals aren’t going to back the Lib Dems next year, not unless there’s something seriously wrong with them. Put it this way: if they find themselves in the polling booth and they have a sudden vision of Ed Miliband gasping like a guppy fish when he’s asked why he forgot one hundred billion pounds, who knows what may happen?
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