INTERESTING TIMES AHEAD
Working on the dangerous assumption that David Cameron will be the new Conservative leader we could be in for a truly fascinating spell in British politics. I say the assumption is dangerous because, though the contest has been a profitable one, I would much rather see Dr Liam Fox emerge from nowhere to lead the party further into oblivion and improve my bank account in the process. But dream scenarios aside, nobody can be quite sure exactly what to expect over the next four years.
The potential pitfalls of choosing a man who has only been in Parliament for four years and has never had to take a tough political decision on the basis of one impressive but vacuous speech and a slick campaign are obvious. Many within the New Labour hierachy will be relieved that they won't be up against the popular Ken Clarke or down to earth hardman David Davis. In those four years in Parliament, Cameron's only front bench post has been shadowing Education Secretary Ruth Kelly. Now Kelly does have an element of bureaucratic competance about her, but great orator she ain't and many shrewd observers guessed that Michael Howard had given his protege the job as a great opportunity to look good and build up a leadership profile. Yet despite media uproar over A-Levels, school dinners and failing city academies, the nicest thing you could say about Cameron's performance has been that he has been anonymous. Blair and Brown have eaten bigger beasts for breakfast.
Prime Minister's Questions should make for interesting if slightly surreal viewing. Tony Blair versus Tony Blair Mark II. Alternatively of course, the younger man could instantly give the Tories a bounce in the polls and quicken Blair's long overdue exit. Then the media's latest darling will at least have the youth advantage over dour Gordon Brown. And does performance in Parliament matter anyway? The Tory backbench tribes warm to combative leaders like William Hague and Michael Howard but there's little to suggest it does anything more for the electorate than re-inforce their distaste for macho adversarial politics. Cameron's greatest strength is his conversational style which seems very much in tune with the modern electorate - particularly critical swing female voters who have abandoned the Tories since 1992 as the infamous Newsnight focus group experiment showed starkly. His comments on last week's Question Time, "If the government do something I agree with, its right that I should say so. People are fed up with punch and judy politics" drew loud applause and shows an understanding gained from his previous job at Carlton TV that some of his older colleagues could learn from.
The crucial question here is whether his colleagues in Parliament can embrace this new style. My suspicion is that, with all the hype that surrounds Cameron now, the Tories will get that instant boost in the polls when he takes over. This should at least keep the critics at bay for that early honeymoon period. But ultimately, there will need to be some substance as well as style and this will be the toughest hurdle to clear. If the media briefings from Cameron's team are to be believed, the new leadership will dramatically overhaul the party's focus. There will be much less on immigration, crime and Europe and more on public services, social exclusion and even global poverty. According to a journalist one would assume to have close links to the Notting Hill Set, Andrew Pierce of The Times, Cameron would reject the agenda of the Daily Mail, even if cost the party up to 7% of its vote in the interim as the prize of the soul of the party was worth more. That's a very laudable goal but smacks of naivety to me. The Mail sells 2.5 million copies for a reason. There has always been and always will be a significant proportion of Britons who agree with their reactionary agenda. It is their unwavering support that has kept the party in business during the darkest days of the past 10 years.
I vividly recall a youthful William Hague inheriting the leadership, dressing in baseball caps at the Notting Hill Carnival, supporting gay marriage and defying the party moralists with the shocking stance of sharing a room with his fiance at the party conference. Within a couple of years he realised such wanton liberalism was destabilising his own position and Hague soon reverted to his 'Skinhead Bill' image, jumping on every bandwagon from the free Tony Martin campaign to backing the fuel protesters. When he inevitably slid to another crushing defeat in 2001, the modernisers and most media pundits blamed the latter strategy but it is also quite possible that it wasn't the issues that lost him support, but the fact that he went about it in such a shamelessly opportunistic fashion. A similar argument can be made for Howard's demise. It wasn't that the public didn't sympathise with Tory positions - polls show they were the favoured party on crime, immigration and Europe - but that they just didn't believe anything uttered by a politician like Howard with a long history of opportunism and insincerity.
And some of the policies advocated by Cameron's team are far more controversial. He has advocated a UN-led process of legalisation and regulation of the global drugs industry. He supports desperately unpopular measures like tuition fees and road pricing. Personally, I applaud him for all three stances as they are based on the sort of pragmatic thinking that I want from politicians but I wonder whether public opinion will respond to such refreshing rhetoric. The genius of Tony Blair and New Labour has been to jump as far behind public opinion as the circumstances will allow while still managing to avoid looking too cynical. Witness the way Blair has snatched the unreal 'Respect' agenda as his own, surely having read the results of focus groups during the 2005 election campaign. I am absolutely certain that the New Labour spin machine has carefully studied every one of Cameron's remarks and expect him to be swiftly labelled as 'soft on drugs' while the government happily pursues all the policies that they know Cameron agrees with so as to eliminate lines of attack. We could even be in the unchartered territory of the Tories opposing Labour from the Left!
On the other hand though, New Labour are deeply unpopular. They managed only 35% of the vote last time. In four years, with the prospect of economic gloom on the horizon and a Labour legacy that once we move beyond the early achievements of the minimum wage and the Northern Ireland peace process looks rather threadbare, Cameron may be left facing the political equivalent of an open goal. All that may be required to blow away their shallow support would be an elimination of the negative traits associated with the Conservative Party. As the author of the content-lite 2005 manifesto, Cameron has shown he is quite happy to use populist slogans that chime with public opinion too.
Equally, the Lib Dems have prospered for the last decade by stealing the votes of moderate, small 'c' Conservatives, exactly the type of voter Cameron looks capable of luring back to the fold. Ultimately, we need to look at the electoral map to see the potential effects. There are a few dozen supermarginals now where a revived Tory party, that has now learnt the art of targetting, should mop up - most notably in Kent and the East Midlands. If they win all of these and snap up a maximum of 20 seats from the Lib Dems then, with a boost of another 20 or so from redrawn boundaries, the Tory tally could rise to about 270. However, this is still fifty odd short of an overall majority and it becomes very tricky to identify where these extra 50 are to come from. It is here that the question of image could backfire. Choosing a posh, liberal modernising young leader should work wonders in winning back some of the lost AB voters, but will it help in places like Cleethorpes and Brigg, let alone a seat like Hartlepool where once the Tories could contend but now they finish an embarrassing fourth in by-elections? It is perfectly feasible that the next election yields an utterly indecisive result that ushers in Charles Kennedy's vision of three party politics. To repeat the title of this article, these are very interesting times ahead.
The potential pitfalls of choosing a man who has only been in Parliament for four years and has never had to take a tough political decision on the basis of one impressive but vacuous speech and a slick campaign are obvious. Many within the New Labour hierachy will be relieved that they won't be up against the popular Ken Clarke or down to earth hardman David Davis. In those four years in Parliament, Cameron's only front bench post has been shadowing Education Secretary Ruth Kelly. Now Kelly does have an element of bureaucratic competance about her, but great orator she ain't and many shrewd observers guessed that Michael Howard had given his protege the job as a great opportunity to look good and build up a leadership profile. Yet despite media uproar over A-Levels, school dinners and failing city academies, the nicest thing you could say about Cameron's performance has been that he has been anonymous. Blair and Brown have eaten bigger beasts for breakfast.
Prime Minister's Questions should make for interesting if slightly surreal viewing. Tony Blair versus Tony Blair Mark II. Alternatively of course, the younger man could instantly give the Tories a bounce in the polls and quicken Blair's long overdue exit. Then the media's latest darling will at least have the youth advantage over dour Gordon Brown. And does performance in Parliament matter anyway? The Tory backbench tribes warm to combative leaders like William Hague and Michael Howard but there's little to suggest it does anything more for the electorate than re-inforce their distaste for macho adversarial politics. Cameron's greatest strength is his conversational style which seems very much in tune with the modern electorate - particularly critical swing female voters who have abandoned the Tories since 1992 as the infamous Newsnight focus group experiment showed starkly. His comments on last week's Question Time, "If the government do something I agree with, its right that I should say so. People are fed up with punch and judy politics" drew loud applause and shows an understanding gained from his previous job at Carlton TV that some of his older colleagues could learn from.
The crucial question here is whether his colleagues in Parliament can embrace this new style. My suspicion is that, with all the hype that surrounds Cameron now, the Tories will get that instant boost in the polls when he takes over. This should at least keep the critics at bay for that early honeymoon period. But ultimately, there will need to be some substance as well as style and this will be the toughest hurdle to clear. If the media briefings from Cameron's team are to be believed, the new leadership will dramatically overhaul the party's focus. There will be much less on immigration, crime and Europe and more on public services, social exclusion and even global poverty. According to a journalist one would assume to have close links to the Notting Hill Set, Andrew Pierce of The Times, Cameron would reject the agenda of the Daily Mail, even if cost the party up to 7% of its vote in the interim as the prize of the soul of the party was worth more. That's a very laudable goal but smacks of naivety to me. The Mail sells 2.5 million copies for a reason. There has always been and always will be a significant proportion of Britons who agree with their reactionary agenda. It is their unwavering support that has kept the party in business during the darkest days of the past 10 years.
I vividly recall a youthful William Hague inheriting the leadership, dressing in baseball caps at the Notting Hill Carnival, supporting gay marriage and defying the party moralists with the shocking stance of sharing a room with his fiance at the party conference. Within a couple of years he realised such wanton liberalism was destabilising his own position and Hague soon reverted to his 'Skinhead Bill' image, jumping on every bandwagon from the free Tony Martin campaign to backing the fuel protesters. When he inevitably slid to another crushing defeat in 2001, the modernisers and most media pundits blamed the latter strategy but it is also quite possible that it wasn't the issues that lost him support, but the fact that he went about it in such a shamelessly opportunistic fashion. A similar argument can be made for Howard's demise. It wasn't that the public didn't sympathise with Tory positions - polls show they were the favoured party on crime, immigration and Europe - but that they just didn't believe anything uttered by a politician like Howard with a long history of opportunism and insincerity.
And some of the policies advocated by Cameron's team are far more controversial. He has advocated a UN-led process of legalisation and regulation of the global drugs industry. He supports desperately unpopular measures like tuition fees and road pricing. Personally, I applaud him for all three stances as they are based on the sort of pragmatic thinking that I want from politicians but I wonder whether public opinion will respond to such refreshing rhetoric. The genius of Tony Blair and New Labour has been to jump as far behind public opinion as the circumstances will allow while still managing to avoid looking too cynical. Witness the way Blair has snatched the unreal 'Respect' agenda as his own, surely having read the results of focus groups during the 2005 election campaign. I am absolutely certain that the New Labour spin machine has carefully studied every one of Cameron's remarks and expect him to be swiftly labelled as 'soft on drugs' while the government happily pursues all the policies that they know Cameron agrees with so as to eliminate lines of attack. We could even be in the unchartered territory of the Tories opposing Labour from the Left!
On the other hand though, New Labour are deeply unpopular. They managed only 35% of the vote last time. In four years, with the prospect of economic gloom on the horizon and a Labour legacy that once we move beyond the early achievements of the minimum wage and the Northern Ireland peace process looks rather threadbare, Cameron may be left facing the political equivalent of an open goal. All that may be required to blow away their shallow support would be an elimination of the negative traits associated with the Conservative Party. As the author of the content-lite 2005 manifesto, Cameron has shown he is quite happy to use populist slogans that chime with public opinion too.
Equally, the Lib Dems have prospered for the last decade by stealing the votes of moderate, small 'c' Conservatives, exactly the type of voter Cameron looks capable of luring back to the fold. Ultimately, we need to look at the electoral map to see the potential effects. There are a few dozen supermarginals now where a revived Tory party, that has now learnt the art of targetting, should mop up - most notably in Kent and the East Midlands. If they win all of these and snap up a maximum of 20 seats from the Lib Dems then, with a boost of another 20 or so from redrawn boundaries, the Tory tally could rise to about 270. However, this is still fifty odd short of an overall majority and it becomes very tricky to identify where these extra 50 are to come from. It is here that the question of image could backfire. Choosing a posh, liberal modernising young leader should work wonders in winning back some of the lost AB voters, but will it help in places like Cleethorpes and Brigg, let alone a seat like Hartlepool where once the Tories could contend but now they finish an embarrassing fourth in by-elections? It is perfectly feasible that the next election yields an utterly indecisive result that ushers in Charles Kennedy's vision of three party politics. To repeat the title of this article, these are very interesting times ahead.
posted by Paul Krishnamurty at 3:34 PM
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