Fraser Nelson
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The main concern is that the Tories’ campaign successes were based on a negative theme — ‘send a message to Brown’. There was no new Tory message being lapped up by the voters, just an opportunity to mine the Prime Minister’s ever-deepening unpopularity. ‘I won over waverers by telling them they can vote Labour at the general election,’ says one Tory campaign director. ‘Families on low incomes ask how we’ll make them better off, and we have no answer.’
It will simply not do for the Conservatives to come back in June 2010 without an answer to this most basic of questions. If the problem was only hazily perceived by Cameron HQ before, it has become clearer now. One shadow Cabinet member says that the Tories have grasped the ‘Thursday night mealtime’ scenario — the problem facing cash-strapped families who must skimp on dinner before payday if the money has been particularly tight that week. The only meaningful pledge to make to such families — the only thing that they want to hear from the Tories — is that they will be less hard up under a different government.
The opposition to upfront tax cut pledges from Cameron HQ is total. Steve Hilton, his chief adviser, slaps down talk of tax cuts at every opportunity — keen to deny this potentially fractious debate the chance to gather momentum. ‘The Cameron policy is “steady as she goes and let Brown keep sinking’’,’ says one shadow minister. The counter argument to this is that a landslide — if achieved — also carries with it the rare opportunity to enact radical change: in this instance, to reverse the tax-raising strategy for which Mr Brown has been responsible.
It is undeniably true that Mr Cameron’s gambit has annoyed the Brownites. ‘Their strategy has been to hug us, not fight us,’ moans one Cabinet member. ‘That does mean we do have difficulty drawing dividing lines.’ But as the economy sours, and inflation is magnified by the mysteriously unremarked-upon collapse of the pound, the case for breaking with Mr Brown’s economic policy gathers.
As it happens, it may be Labour which first breaks free from Mr Cameron’s unwanted embrace. Since Boris Johnson’s victory there has been much evidence of Labour returning to the left. There is something about the Mayor of London which arouses Labour’s baser instincts — here is someone not in the least ashamed about his background, who has been elected in spite of it. He acts as a blond matador, tempting out Labour’s bullish inner demons which Tony Blair tried to keep at bay. The ‘toff’ line of attack is back.
It was revived to ignominious effect at Crewe, where Labour activists dressed in top hats to deride the wealth of Edward Timpson, the Tory candidate. That he was later found to be no more grand than any other old boy of Manchester Grammar is par for the course. As Tories know, when an opinion poll lead disappears, party discipline soon follows. The ‘toff’ jibes, together with the new restive mood in the Commons and the shriller voices on the abortion debate, suggest that Labour is now moving inexorably to the left.
To suggest that this has been orchestrated by 10 Downing Street is to exaggerate the control the Prime Minister exerts over his party. Stephen Carter, who has organised Mr Brown’s recent forays on to the internet, is understood to be aghast at the class war line of attack. But if the Labour rank and file is hunting for dividing lines with Mr Cameron’s Conservatives, it will keep moving in this direction.
Here lies Mr Cameron’s opportunity. It was Labour’s departure to the outer reaches of left-wing politics in the 1980s that emboldened the Thatcher government and allowed it to enact the economic reform which so transformed this country. If Labour moves leftwards, so Mr Cameron could find he has the space he needs to offer low-income voters a meaningful choice on election day by pledging to cut their taxes.
Mr Cameron remains wary of hubris, and reproaches colleagues who sound too optimistic. ‘I’m superstitious!’ he exclaimed in shadow Cabinet recently, when the mood became too buoyant. But as one senior party strategist puts it, ‘the earth moved on the day of the local elections’. Labour has a leader so unpopular they dare not use his photograph or even his name on election literature. And he is determined to stay for two more years hoping — like John Major and Mr Micawber before him — that something will turn up.
One might argue that Mr Cameron does not deserve this opportunity, has not earned it. But it is his anyway. He is astute enough to distinguish between the brutal wave of hostility to Gordon Brown rippling across the nation in May 2008, and bankable support for his own party two years hence. The difference between a workable Tory majority and a Tory landslide may well depend on the extent to which he can assure low-income voters in places like Crewe, with robust policy promises, that they will be better off under the Conservatives. Mr Cameron has a year — at most — in which to decide if this is a gamble he is willing to take.
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