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This had always been the doubt about Johnson. At Blair’s last conference as Labour leader, Johnson allegedly told friends that he could beat Brown, but that he wouldn’t challenge for the leadership.
Cameron’s speech on Tuesday was also a political response to the current crisis. He declared that ‘the only one way out of this national crisis we face’ is a ‘massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power’.
There is a natural tendency to be cynical about leaders making this kind of statement before they have been institutionalised by Number 10. In the 1996 John Smith Memorial Lecture, Tony Blair said ‘New Labour wants to give power to the people’. And even Brown began his premiership by ‘proposing changes that will transfer power from the Prime Minister and the executive’.
But Cameron has not suddenly adopted these ideas in the light of recent events. The central argument of his speech, that too many powers have been handed from elected representatives to unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats, judges and quangocrats, was also at the heart of his speech to the Power Inquiry in May 2006. The difference, though, was that this time Cameron made the solution — ‘the redistribution of power’ — explicit not implicit. One enthusiast for the agenda raves that, ‘if the Power Inquiry speech was John the Baptist, this one was Jesus Christ.’
In the current atmosphere, it is hard to see how Cameron could go back on his word. As one key Cameron supporter says, it would be a whole different order of magnitude for a politician to break a promise about ending politicians’ broken promises. It would also be suicidal.
In his speech, Cameron proposed a ‘citizens initiative’. Based on the Swiss model, this would give local people the right to hold a referendum if 5 per cent of them demanded it. These referendums would be able to force the council to do anything if it was legal. It takes little imagination to see just how this could transform everything from planning to local services.
There is still some debate in Tory circles about whether Cameron means what he says or has grasped the full significance of it. Certainly, the planning for how to implement these changes is less advanced than the rhetoric. There has, for instance, been no rigorous war-gaming of how any negotiation with the European Union about the return of powers might pan out. But if Cameron is serious about transferring power ‘from Brussels to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy’, then we are talking about the biggest constitutional change in Britain since the introduction of universal suffrage.
Intriguingly, Cameron has chosen to fight not on pragmatic or technocratic grounds but on the moral high ground. By placing his arguments for repatriating powers from Brussels, ending the human rights ratchet and laying waste to quangos in democratic terms, he is challenging his opponents to make explicit the anti-democratic assumptions that lie behind their objections to this.
If Cameron has the courage to push through these changes, they will never be reversed. The people will not give up the powers they have gained.
Not all of Cameron’s party are on board with this reformation. Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary, is — as one Tory puts it — a lawyer who is comfortable with other lawyers making decisions about peoples’ lives. There is considerable doubt about whether Grieve’s proposed fix to the problem posed by the European Court of Human Rights is sufficient; some even wonder whether it is meant to be. Many mutter that moving Grieve would be the real proof that Cameron is serious about this aspect of his plan.
Then there is Ken Clarke. Back when he was merely head of Cameron’s democracy task force, Clarke called Cameron’s proposal for dealing with the problems caused by the Human Rights Act ‘xenophobic and legal nonsense’. He is also, of course, an advocate of a transfer of power from Britain to Brussels.
But this crisis provides Cameron with an opportunity. There is a general acceptance of the need for change. The question is who will provide the change and how radical will it be. Alan Johnson’s suggestion that we dust off the Jenkins report on electoral reform at Westminster might have allowed him skilfully to put down a marker for the Labour leadership. But it hardly seems an adequate response to the public’s rage at our whole political system. Cameron is the politician offering the most far-reaching agenda, one that by restoring accountability could restore faith in politics. The Tory pragmatist has realised that politicians now have to share power or lose it.
If Cameron follows through, the changes he proposed on Tuesday will be his legacy. Labour will have to accept them, as it had to accept Thatcher’s economic and trade union reforms, before it can win again.
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