The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron by Tim Bale
Polity, £25
David Cameron is not “Tony Blair’s heir” as he once foolishly claimed, but he is Blair’s mirror image. After John Major’s victory in 1992, Blair realised that Labour had to change if it were to reverse three successive general election defeats. When he became leader after John Smith’s death in 1994, he made a start, symbolised by the scrapping of Clause IV and launching the concept of New Labour.
When Cameron became leader of the Tory party in 2005, after its third successive defeat by Blair, he adopted Blair’s tactics. Blair had moved Labour from the left towards the centre. Cameron moved the Tories from the right towards the centre and spoke of the “new Conservatives”. Blair’s enemies in the Labour Party now denounce him as a Tory in disguise. Cameron’s enemies in the Conservative Party see him as a Blair in disguise. But Blair delivered and Cameron looks like doing so, and ordinary members of whichever party won’t quarrel with that. The troubles of a winner are always fewer than the virtues of the loser.
That the fruits of the changes which look like bringing Cameron victory within the next few months contain the seeds which will bring him to eventual defeat won’t worry him at the moment. Like all Prime Ministers, he will think he can buck history. In any case, democratic horizons don’t stretch beyond the next general election.
The background and the context of the arrival of Cameron at where he is today are set out in this entertaining, amusing and engrossing account of the Tories from Margaret Thatcher onwards. For a contemporary history of British politics, deliciously free of the jargon which usually masks the failure of academics to understand their subject, you will read nothing better than this.
Tim Bale, a lecturer in politics at Sussex University, is withering about Cameron’s predecessors. Here he is on Thatcher: the “decision of the party to get rid of her was a rational act”. Major: “the least worst option” to succeed her, a “conciliator who became a confidence trickster”. William Hague: “a leader who began badly and grew weaker as he went on”. Iain Duncan Smith: “not renowned among colleagues as being the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
He quotes David Willetts asking, during Hague’s leadership: “Is there anything we will not do to get three paragraphs on the front page?” At the same time, according to another Shadow Cabinet member, getting a good headline in the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail was like “a fix of approval”. That hardly excused, however, Hague’s praise of Jeffrey Archer as “a man of probity and integrity” a few weeks before the party began the process of throwing him out and the courts began the process of putting him in jail.
Putative leaders fare no better. After quoting the estimate that a former pupil of Eton stands a 384 to one better chance of becoming a Tory candidate than a state-educated one, Bale says of Cameron’s main opponent in the contest for the Tory leadership, David Davis: “He had a reputation as a lazy but arrogant know all, a charmless, calculating and egotistical chancer, unpopular even with those who shared his Thatcherite and morally conservative views.”
And I don’t imagine that Steve Hilton, Cameron’s supposed strategy “guru” today, will be happy to be reminded that he supported John Redwood when the Vulcan stood against John Major for the leadership of the Conservative Party after Major temporarily resigned it, or that he was the inventor of the “demon eyes” poster about Tony Blair which rebounded so spectacularly. But as Bale remarks later: “The Conservative Party – like many other parties [who could he mean?] – is not so full of talent, or so meritocratic and open, that it can easily rid itself of people who, in an earlier guise, have been deeply associated with embarrassment and/or failure.”
Nor will Cameron be delighted to recall that another of his principal advisers, his communications boss, Andy Coulson, was editor of the News of the World when it invented the phrase “hug a hoodie”. Or, as his new found friend, The Sun, put it: “Love a lout.”
Bale is dismissive, while admitting its overwhelming importance, of the “party in the media”. The Spectator is the Tory “house magazine” and the Daily Telegraph “the house daily”. As for the Daily Mail, his contempt is undisguised, though he realises its value to the party and he quotes one senior Tory official as saying: “We read the Daily Mail editorial one day and make it our policy the next.”
As for the stereotype of the party in the country, Bale records one Tory member saying memorably: “That by default we are all racist, misogynist, uncaring, dim-witted, nationalistic, homophobic, selfish, materialistic, militaristic, jingoistic, meat-eating, double-barrelled, unsophisticated, fox-hunting, anti-intellectual, brutish, elitist, high church, no church, reactionary, iconoclastic, country dwelling, two house owning, bulldog walking, white English men.” To many Tory MPs, says Bale, this is a travesty of the truth – but what a travesty! – but, to others, Tory activists do live up to the “familiar stereotype”.
Cameron is largely excluded from criticism, though the fault lines of future disasters can faintly be seen. His attempts to make the Tories the party of the NHS and state education have had some significant success among ordinary voters, though the polls quoted demonstrate that his party is still distrusted, much more so than he is.
When things start to get rough, as they do with every government, the party hardcore activists – like those who remained dormant during Blair’s premiership – begin to stir from hibernation. One of Harold Wilson’s laws of politics was that people vote for “half crowns in their pockets.” Or as Bill Clinton put it: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Maybe not yet, when the voters have been conditioned to accept that there are hard times ahead, but the time will come when they will want the half crowns (for younger readers, twelve-and-a-half pence) to be filling their pockets again.
The Cameron Tories are electorally committed to pumping money into health and education. But, when politics change, so do commitments. They are, however, ideologically committed to tax cuts. Ideology is what any party is about. Eventually, there will be an upsurge of those wanting their ideology. If it’s a choice between one or the other, they’ll want the other.
So far, Cameron has been successful in warding off coherent opposition. He blithely commits U-turns – grammar schools are just one of many examples – and gets away with it, a skilful combination of the ingenuity of Max Clifford and the cheek of Max Miller but, as Enoch Powell once said, all politics end in failure. The question for the Labour Party if Cameron wins the general election, is when will it all go wrong for him? Not after winning three elections in a row, we must hope.
Joe Haines
