David Cameron has kept his promise. In an article in the Spectator in October, he pledged that under his leadership, "the Conservative party will look, feel, think and behave like a completely new party." To the surprise of many critics and some supporters, he kept his word. Those who imagined that the modernising agenda was merely about style have been proved wrong. It was predictable, of course, that Cameron should use his first public speech as leader to distance himself from Margaret Thatcher. New Tory leaders generally do—and then ask for her help in fundraising. But Cameron has gone further than that. He has systematically repositioned the party to the left.
He attacks "big business" as a malign interest that needs to be curbed. Where Tony Blair is trying to avoid the economic straitjacket represented by a new Kyoto-style agreement on carbon emissions, Cameron publicly favours a "son of Kyoto," with all that involves for business costs. The party is also, it seems, now opposed to expansion of nuclear power. Only windmills will do.
The new leader is hostile to real competition and choice in the public services. He has pledged that there will be no expansion of grammar schools and seems to regard private provision in health as morally discreditable and a drain upon, not a supplement to, state provision. He has also ruled out any shift away from a wholly tax-funded health service and rejected tax cuts as a threat to "economic stability." The Conservatives may well finish up at the next election pledged to higher taxes than Labour. This does not, though, disturb them. The party's policy chief, Oliver Letwin, has explained that the priority is to "redistribute money" and so "narrow the gap between rich and poor." This would presumably mean an extension of targeted tax credits and certainly higher taxation on the wealthy. Cameron promised in his Spectator article that he will "stay the course." But should the party?
Cameron supporters point to a rise in party support among the ABs and younger voters at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. Yet the risks attached to Cameron's strategy are much more profound than those measurable by day-to-day opinion polls. And Cameron should be worried that the party's new direction is treated with thinly disguised contempt by the policy experts, opinion-formers and intellectuals clustered round many of the Tory think tanks. He should be concerned about important donors, who are unlikely to feel much sympathy for an approach that is hostile to enterprise and markets and accepts the New Labour status quo. But, above all, he should be having sleepless nights about what he is doing to bedrock Conservative support in the country.
Like every other right of centre party in the developed world, the Conservative party has an electoral base consisting of social conservatives and economic liberals. The former are most worried about threats to order— uncontrolled immigration, crime, family breakdown and welfare dependency. The latter are keenest on self-improvement, to be achieved through low taxes, light regulation and opportunities to save. The balance between the two groups may shift. The precise issues may change. But Conservative success depends on keeping that dual base happy. Cameron, though, has set out to alienate and, indeed, outrage both strands of opinion.
There are good reasons why every Tory leader since Margaret Thatcher has started by proclaiming the party's transformation into something kinder, gentler and more left-wing—and then conducted a sharp rightward turn. Core issues alone cannot deliver a majority, admittedly, but they have held together the party's base support. Without that, the Tory party under a succession of poor leaders would have been bypassed in the popular vote by the Lib Dems. The current assumption—that the base will remain secure whatever policies are adopted—is potentially disastrous.
Abandoning one's base rather than building out from it involves huge risks. When the Canadian Conservative party swung sharply leftwards in search of a new identity in the 1990s, it was reduced to two seats in the 1993 election. Now, 13 years later, the Canadian right has formed the government once again—by doing precisely the opposite. That is also the moral to be drawn from the successes of unashamedly conservative John Howard in Australia.
Of course, mobilising the base is not an alternative to change. All successful leaders seek to reform their party, as did Thatcher. The trouble is that Cameron wants to change it into an institution with no obvious purpose other than to ape New Labour.
Yet surely adopting positions that improve the party's image allows Cameron to claim Blair's legacy of modernity and moderation? The answer depends on Gordon Brown. The Tory modernisers believe that they will be able to depict Brown as an unreconstructed socialist: "extreme" and "very much a 1980s politician," as Cameron put it in an interview with the Sunday Times in January.
The Conservative leader, though, is only half right, and it is the wrong half. There is no evidence that Brown will pursue more "extreme" socialist policies than Blair. He will be committed to the rigorous spending limits he set himself last year. For their part, the Tories will have ruled out precisely those fundamental public sector reforms that would have allowed them to promise to improve education and health within smaller budgets. Having abandoned the issues of immigration, crime, Europe and tax as distastefully populist, the Tory manifesto may look a little thin.
Of course, there is Gordon Brown himself. He is gloomy of countenance, obsessed with the minutiae of policy, middle-aged and resolutely unfashionable. Will not a relaxed, undogmatic, youngish politician necessarily have the better of him? That remains to be seen. Cameron was bright and personable when, after some judicious prodding from a royal equerry, I gave him his first job at the Conservative research department. He remains so, and he has since become a persuasive speaker. But up against Brown he may look unprincipled and insubstantial.
Cameron, though, is right about one thing. Brown is in many respects "very much a 1980s politician," in some ways temperamentally similar to Thatcher, who dominated that decade. It is significant that Brown has publicly praised her record while the Tories have sought to disavow it. Like Thatcher, Brown is immensely able, a workaholic, driven by values inherited from a Protestant upbringing. He believes in duty, work, effort, merit. He is serious about politics and contemptuous of those more interested, like his next-door neighbour, in the trappings of power. He is passionate about improving the lives of those at the bottom of the pile. One should also add that Brown is 100 per cent wrong about how to achieve these noble goals. But David Cameron takes almost as much of a risk in underestimating the character of Gordon Brown as he does with his own U-turns.
