by David Mills
IN A difficult week economically, Labour strategists got at least one thing right. They resisted the temptation to attack Kenneth Clarke as a Thatcherite fellow traveller, returning to the Shadow Cabinet to grind the faces of the poor. While some mischief-making on his support for elements of the Government’s economic policies was to be expected, Labour message-makers wisely concluded that they had to keep their sights fixed on the main thrust of Tory economic policy and not the personnel involved in running it.
The best approach is probably to portray Clarke’s return as the political equivalent of the wind turbine on David Cameron’s house – an eye-catching gesture which will have little practical beneficial effect. The promotion to the Shadow Cabinet of Mark Francois, the staunchly sceptical Europe spokesman, may be a reflection of the concern among the party leadership about Conservative Eurosceptic opinion. The UK Independence Party has been riven by internal disputes in the past 12 months and the last thing Cameron needs is for Clarke’s return to divert the anti-Brussels vote to Nigel Farage and his cohorts, depriving him of what he must hope will be good results in June’s European elections.
Beyond the return of Ken Clarke, the main point of interest for Labour is probably the move of the ambitious Chris Grayling to shadow Jacqui Smith at the Home Office, pushing the more old-school figure of Dominic Grieve to shadow Justice Secretary Jack Straw. A former television producer, Grayling is probably the best operator on the front bench in terms of how he uses the media to set hares running and harry ministers, although it will be interesting to see whether he is able to rival David Davis – and Damian Green – in his development of what might be euphemistically termed “unofficial government sources”.
Apart from the diversion of the personnel changes on the Conservative front bench, the only change in political trade this week has been the publication of a cluster of opinion polls suggesting that the “Brown bounce” has come to an end.
Ministers will be aware that polls can go up as well as down, and while the day-to-day news cycle is dominated by the turbulence in the banking sector, it is difficult to put too much weight on the results of a few surveys. Despite this, Labour’s message on the economy remains that only the present Government can take both the short-term measures required to stabilise the economy and the long-term measure needed to ensure that Britain’s workforce is equipped for the post-recession world.
Ministers will hope that, in the months to come, a measure of stability can be restored to the financial sector, leaving them with the still daunting but potentially achievable task of explaining that Labour’s policies are best placed to equip the country to emerge from recession in 2010. But the local and European elections in June are looming, and these represent a pothole which will have to be navigated around if the political recovery from the hoped-for economic stabilisation isn’t to be thrown off course by two heavy electoral defeats.
