Showing posts with label Tory Conference 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tory Conference 2007. Show all posts

Saturday, October 06, 2007

We need more time

Now is not the time for a general election, not for Gordon Brown, not for David Cameron, certainly not for Ming Campbell. But more importantly not for the country. I explain why in my Saturday Column in today's Newcastle Journal which is reproduced in full below.

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In the long history of British political conferences, seldom has a party leader faced a more difficult task than the one faced by Tory leader David Cameron this week in Blackpool.

With the polls showing Labour up to 11 points in the lead and speculation about a snap election reaching near-boiling point, Mr Cameron somehow needed to convince Gordon Brown to hold off from going to the country.

For sheer brinkmanship, the Tory leader’s call for the Prime Minister to “bring it on” is not quite up there with “Go ahead, punk, make my day” – but it’s not far off.

Will Gordon call his bluff? We will know soon enough – but if Mr Cameron has managed to persuade him to think twice, it will go down as one of the greatest acts of political escapology in modern times.

For make no mistake, whatever Mr Cameron may say in public, he and his party do not want an election on November 1 or 8 – or indeed at any point until next spring at the earliest.

There may still be very real doubt over whether an election held now would enable Mr Brown to increase Labour’s majority, which as I have argued all along, should be the determining factor for him in whether to hold one.

But of one thing there is very little doubt – that if an election were held now, the Conservatives would not win it.

Under our skewed electoral system, they need to be 8-10 points ahead of Labour – as they were before Mr Brown took over – before they can even think of securing an overall majority.

So Mr Cameron’s principal aim throughout this conference week has been to buy time – time to enable him to get his party’s policies in order, time to allow the Brown Bounce to wear off.

Yesterday morning’s polls, most showing Labour’s lead has fallen sharply to around 3-4pc, certainly suggest he might have done enough.

Mr Brown and his closest aides are expected to make a final decision over the course of this weekend, but any sensible reading of the situation would suggest the polls are far too volatile for him to risk it.

This is no more than is to be expected. The wiser heads among the political commentariat have long been arguing that you need three or four weeks after the end of the conference season for public opinion to settle down.

So if Mr Cameron has indeed succeeded in postponing the election, how did he do it? Well, with a mixture of skilful party management, sheer oratorical bravura – and a single very clever policy initiative

The Tories arrived in Blackpool in a state of some chaos, with policy commissions busily contradicting eachother and Old Right figures such as Lord Tebbit comparing Mr Cameron unfavourably to Mr Brown.

To have managed to impose some discipline on that rabble, while also extracting some sort of coherent programme from the welter of new policy ideas, was no mean feat.

It does not mean the Tories are necessarily ready for government, but they at least looked united and sensible, two of the key prerequisites for a party wishing to be taken seriously by the voters.

As for Mr Cameron’s keynote speech on Wednesday, he showed again that in terms of personal charisma, he is streets ahead of anyone currently operating in British politics.

But for the first time, I think he also demonstrated that there might be more to him than just a slick PR man.

I particularly liked the way he tackled head-on the “Tory toff” jibes about his upbringing, saying that it was because he had such a “fantastic” education that he wanted the same for all children.

The note of optimism – “you can get it if you really want it” – may have seemed clichéd to some, but is very necessary in a political culture that is becoming corroded by cynicism.

But it was not Mr Cameron who unveiled the most significant policy initiative in Blackpool. That came in the week’s other big speech, from the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne on Monday.

However much Labour may quibble about how it is to be paid for, his announcement that a Conservative government would raise the threshold of Inheritance Tax to £1m is a surefire vote winner- and Mr Brown knows it.

As I have noted previously, the rise in house prices and consequent increase in the value of estates have turned this into a grossly unfair tax that now affects a large number of ordinary families.

If the Tories really have turned the polls around this week, I believe it was this, more than Mr Cameron’s speech, which will have really forced the voters to sit up and take notice.

So where to from here? Well, it’s been an inconclusive conference season in my view, with no clear winners and, with the possible exception of Sir Menzies Campbell, no clear losers.

That seems to suggest to me that the time is not right for the country to make an informed choice about who governs it for the next five years.

Sure, Gordon Brown has made a good start as Prime Minister, dealing capably with a series of crises and commanding the centre ground, but it is still too early to make a real assessment of his performance in the job.

In particular, we need to see if the man who announced an Iraq troop withdrawal in a bid to disrupt the Tory conference really can live up to his promises of “new politics” and an end to spin.

As for David Cameron, the noted commentator Simon Jenkins wrote on Thursday that he looks like a man who will be Prime Minister one day – but not yet. I would go along with that.

His modernisation programme is still only half-complete and we need to see if he can follow-up the initiative on Inheritance Tax with other concrete and coherent policy pledges.

Speaking both as a commentator and as a voter, I hope we will be given the time we need to see how these two men continue to perform in their respective roles before being forced to choose between them.

But will we get it? Only one of them knows the answer to that.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007

Could Cameron really survive an election defeat?

Amid the ongoing welter of election speculation, one piece that caught my eye today was from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, in which he argues that while David Cameron's Blackpool speech showed him to be a Prime Minister in the making, he is not yet one that is ready to take over the job in less than a month's time.

It's an interesting thesis in that it rests on the idea that Cameron could lose a general election which the Tories were once expected to win comfortably yet still survive as party leader.

But is he right? Well, history - particularly that of the Tory Party - would strongly suggest otherwise.

The last party leader to be given a second chance after losing one election was Neil Kinnock (1987 and 1992), but he was leader of the Labour Party which traditionally has a more tolerant attitude to defeat. The only post-war Tory leader to be given two bites at the cherry was Edward Heath (1966 and 1970), and this may have been influenced by the fact that he had only been in the job a year when the first of those contests took place.

There is a common consensus that had she lost the 1979 election, even Margaret Thatcher would have been swiftly despatched in favour of a more traditonal, reassuring figure like Jim Prior or Francis Pym.

So could Cameron really buck this trend? Well, I suppose it depends partly on the alternatives.

Some on the right still hanker after a David Davis leadership, but he will be in his 60s by the time the election after next comes round. Liam Fox is the likeliest right-wing challenger, but he has always seemed to me to lack ruthlessness.

Meanwhile William Hague has said repeatedly he does not want the job, certainly not while the party is still in opposition. Chris Grayling is the dark horse, but he scarcely rivals Cameron in the charisma stakes.

It will also, of course, depend on the closeness of the result. If Cameron can succeed in turning Gordon Brown into a John Major figure, dependent on a wafer-thin majority and ever-fighting to beat back the tide of the inevitable Tory advance, then I guess he may well continue in the job.

But even then, I don't expect it will be without a fight.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Farewell Blackpool

David Cameron's closing speech in Blackpool today - a storming success by all accounts - marked the end of an era in British political conferences, with none of the major parties due to return to the old Lancashire seaside down.

Most politicians and journalists will no doubt be relieved about that. Few ever had a good word to say about the place. But I have always begged to differ.

Of the other main conference venues, Bournemouth was ruined by the dismal press facilities - they used to put us in a windowless underground car park, in seats so uncomfortable that one year I did my back in and spent the next fortnight practically unable to move. And Brighton was wrecked by the security arrangements - the configuration of the Brighton Centre meant the entire seafront had to be sealed off and after-hours access was inevitably limited to a roundabout route to the rear.

I always had a better time in Blackpool. I found a good little hotel, the Tregenna, within walking distance of the conference centre which I used to stay in year after year, and for mealtimes instead of being forced to eat pretentious, overpriced food I would tend to frequent a marvellous chippie on the outskirts of the town centre.

The best thing about Blackpool, though, was the Number Ten Bar at the Imperial Hotel, the atmosphere of which was like nothing else - maybe because it lent itself more to the noble art of beer-drinking rather than the copious wine-quaffing you were likely to see in Brighton's Grand or Bournemouth's Highcliffe.

Even though the hotel itself is unlikely to play host to a conference again, I hope someone preserves that bar for posterity.

Update: For a more mainstream view of Blackpool, read Iain Dale's Spectator Diary

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Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Support grows for fixed terms

I have already made clear my own view that it's high time we moved to a system of four-year fixed-term parliaments in this country, so I was interested to see that Mail political editor and top blogger Ben Brogan shares this view.

"Once all this nonsense is over, I'm going to start campaigning for fixed terms," he says on his blog today, in the context of the ongoing election speculation.

Meanwhile Tory grandee Sir Malcolm Rifkind had another solution to what he termed the "constitutional outrage" of an election held two years into a parliament.

He joked: "I just wish the Queen would say 'you cannot have one'. It would probably be the end of the monarchy but what a way to go!"

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Monday, October 01, 2007

Will Brown trump Osborne

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne's announcement that a Conservative government will raise the inheritance tax threshold has predictably gone down a storm in Blackpool, and interestingly, Labour's initial attack seems focused on how the tax cut will be paid for rather than the idea itself.

It begs the question once again in my mind whether the Tories are being too cautious, and whether Gordon Brown's response will now be to pledge to scrap inheritance tax altogether, or, at the very least, exempt all family homes from its ambit.

Restricting inheritance tax to a "millionaires only" tax is a surefire voter winner with the aspirational middle-classes the Tories need to win back, and Brown is far too smart not to realise this.

The Prime Minister has already shown himself a past master in the art of political cross-dressing. Surely this is a case for more shameless stealing of the Tories' clothes.

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No more sunshine kid

David Cameron rightly came in for a fair amount of ridicule last year for using the phrase "let sunshine win the day!" in his opening conference speech.

But as Iain Dale reports today, what the activists want to hear from him this year is "a bit of Donner und Blitzen. No sunshine thank you very much."

This apparently light-hearted comment exemplifies the change in strategy that has occurred in the past few months as the Tories realised they had seriously underestimated Gordon Brown.

Cameron thought he could win the next election simply by demonstrating he was the "sunnier" character of the two. He has since discovered that the British electorate - or at least those bits of it that talk to opinion pollsters - really aren't that shallow.

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