Kevin Maguire – As I please
THE TOFFS are off to China next week, courtesy of Tory tours, paying homage to a work ’em hard Communist regime with a mill owner’s attitude to class relations. So David Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne should feel at home in the self-styled people’s republic this coming Monday to Thursday, the Notting Hellers posing as eager chaps expecting to be Downing Street neighbours.
The Tory leader’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn – an Old Etonian, naturally, and a former aide to the last Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten – recently spent the weekend networking in Oxfordshire to press the flesh of Chinese big-wigs at a Ditchley Park seminar on Anglo-Sino relations.
There’s nothing unusual in any of that. An aspiring Prime Minister is expected to travel abroad and see the world, collecting air miles to broaden the CV, even if it was Cameron’s terrible luck last summer to zip over to Rwanda just as the heavens opened and swamped his Witney constituency under three feet of water. If that doesn’t prove God backs Gord, I’m not sure what does.
But back to Asia. Cameron’s already had his photograph snapped in India so it’s understandable that China, the world’s most populous nation and an Asian superpower, is on the onetime television spin-doctor’s list of countries to tick off.
What’s unusual, however, is the timing. Cameron and Osborne booked their trip after discovering Gordon Brown is due to go to China in early 2008. I must make a note to check the Register of Members’ Interests to uncover who is financing the Tory boys’ jaunt. From memory, I recall the guy who runs JCB helped with India, the boss of Carphone Warehouse with an away-day to Germany, while travel agent Lord Ashcroft of Belize issues so many flight tickets he really should buy an air steward’s uniform or join Abta.
Yet the China jolly, the political equivalent of a pupil nicking an exam paper and shouting out the answer before the teacher’s asked the question, is evidence of more than a fondness for travel.
The Tory tactic is no longer to shadow the Government, responding to whatever Brown and his Cabinet announce, but to foreshadow the Government: finding out what the Prime Minister and his colleagues are up to and then occupying the territory first. The intention is to give the appearance of setting the agenda with premature disclosure – what could be termed a case of coming too soon in politics.
The trick’s pretty neat and is played particularly regularly in education, where excitable foreshadow education secretary Michael Gove demanded, for example, a renewed emphasis on teaching young kids to read when he knew that Ed Balls was preparing proposals of his own on the very issue.
The downside for the Cons is Labour can tailor policies to counter Tory pre-announcements, although the doubling of inheritance tax allowances to £600,000 in the autumn’s mini-Budget after Osborne £1 million offer (a move, incidentally, that would save his own family £280,000 in an orgy of self-interest) unexpectedly backfired and looked cheap.
Number 10 is irritated by the Tory strategy which probably means the leader of the toffs’ party will play Mystic Cameron for some time to come. Brown is pretending neither to notice nor care, as he does when taking more blows than Ricky Hatton at Prime Minister’s Questions.
But the new professionalism of the Tories will be little more than a raspberry if the Government gets right two issues of vastly greater importance in the political playground.
The first is to run Britain efficiently and effectively – something absent in recent months. Northern Rock and a couple of lost CDs, never mind dodgy donations to Labour, cannot be laid directly at Brown’s door, but he gets the blame as party leader and Prime Minister.
And the second is to draw some thick red lines between Labour and the Tories, giving people hope and great reasons to vote Labour. The responsibility for that is at Brown’s door.
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REPORTS of Rupert Murdoch’s retreat from Britain, with apologies to Mark Twain, are greatly exaggerated. The appointment of son James Murdoch to run News Corp in Europe and Asia excited Cameron and dismayed Brown.
The PM got along well with the old man because his administration, like Tony Blair’s, didn’t interfere with Murdoch Senior’s licence to print money.
Thirty-something Murdoch junior is closer in outlook and age to Cameron, although the baby media mogul’s green tinge is genuine and not just a public relations position.
But I suspect a tycoon as domineering as Pa Murdoch isn’t going to wake up and one morning suddenly let the boy dictate the political line of The Sun and News of the World without first consulting daddy.
And, as I’ve written here before, Murdoch doesn’t make winners, he backs them. So he’ll hedge his bets all the way to the general election.
