10 JUNE 2006, Page 28

SHARED OPINION

FRANK JOHNSON

We should be told whether Ernie the milkman would make the Tory A-list

Mr Cameron’s feat in attracting Ernie, the most famous milkman in the history of the British dairy industry, to the Conservative cause could prove as bold as his winning over the help of the equally controversial Bob Geldof. But it is also a risk. Ernie’s recruitment already worries both Tory modernisers and Tory traditionalists.

This is because this renowned milkman is as hard to define ideologically as Mr Cameron is himself. Ernie is white, male, and very much a heterosexual. Those three attributes, when combined in one person, would normally exclude him from the A-list of Conservative candidates.

But Ernie did not, so far as is known, go to Eton. Nor did he follow a course of study at either Oxford or Cambridge. Or if he did, it was at an unfashionable college. He presumably has the highest of milkman’s qualifications, but apart from that is self-educated. Furthermore, unlike most Tory candidates, he speaks with a regional accent; that of a region — the West — with many seats which the Tories must win back from the Liberal Democrats. Surely, then, he is just the sort of classless figure that the party badly needs.

He is also, shamelessly, a celebrity. One cannot be the fastest milkman in the West without becoming famous. Traditionalists sneer at this. His only claim to being on the A-list would be that his fame derived from something which has nothing to do with politics, to wit his speed with cart and bottles. But ours is the age of celebrity. The Conservative party, in its choice of candidates, must turn this to its advantage.

In any case, Tory historians, anxious for future honours from the leader if he becomes prime minister, can always be found to put the best face on whatever the Tory party does or whoever is in it. Disraeli, they will explain, would have put on the white coat and cap, and leapt to the controls of the whirring float if necessary. ‘Pasteurised, Prime Minister?’ his foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, would have asked him. ‘Past m’head, my dear Salisbury, if it’ll help see off that sanctimonious hypocrite Gladstone.’ Still, there are legitimate objections to Mr Cameron’s seeking Ernie’s support. Now Ernie loved a widow, a lady known as Sue, She lived alone in Liddley Lane at number 22.

They said she was too good for him, she was haughty, proud and chic, But Ernie got his cocoa there three times every week.

The party chairman, Francis Maude (addressing Steve Hilton, the public relations eminence who, apart from Mr Cameron himself, must be the Cameroon most responsible for the leader’s good opinion polls): ‘Er, Steve, I think a lot of people, particularly women, will be worried about that stuff to do with cocoa three times a week.’ Mr Hilton: ‘Well, I suppose it’s a bit sexist.’ Mr Maude: ‘Sexist? In what way?’ Mr Hilton: ‘Well, it’s a euphemism, isn’t it?’ Mr Maude: ‘A euphemism? For what?’ Mr Hilton: ‘Well, for sex.’ Mr Maude: ‘Good God! Sex! My objection was that the sort of urban professionals whom we’re trying to attract don’t drink cocoa. It’s old-fashioned. They drink, for example, something called mocha.’ Mr Cameron: ‘Steve, Francis, no problem. Let’s change it to how Ernie got his mochas at Sue’s place three times a week.’ Mr Maude: ‘That somehow sounds vaguely worse.’ This needs the opinion of a professional. Julia Hobsbawm, the greatest living theoretician of PR, would surely rule: ‘I’m a great admirer of both Dave and Ernie. I brought them together at that exciting interface where politicians and milkmen can achieve an empathy provided they can overcome the mistrust that the two professions have for one another. I’m proud to say that Ernie’s interfaced with my mocha more than three times a week.’ Ernie would be proud of her.

Mr Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, says that it is in the interests of ‘stability’ that the Conservatives will not promise lower taxes at the next general election. A Financial Times leader supports him. Mr Osborne was ‘right to prefer stability to immediate cuts’. ‘No doubt, the electorate would prefer lower taxes, but not if the price would be worse public services or a return to the bad days of macroeconomic instability.’ Stability and instability, then, seem important words for the opponents of Tory tax cuts.

It is always helpful, on any subject, to see what the subject’s classics say. The classical economists — from Adam Smith onwards — say nothing about taxes having anything to do with stability, though stability was something they valued. Tories no longer much read the classical economists, though there was a vogue for their reading them in the 1970s as the post-classical economy went steadily wrong.

Almost all the classicists’ pronouncements on taxation warn of its dangers. Ricardo concedes that ‘notwithstanding’ increased taxation, income ‘is probably greater at the present time [1817] than at any former period in our history’. He notes the extension of agriculture, increases in shipping and manufactures, the building of docks, the opening of canals ‘as well as many other expensive undertakings; all denoting an increase both of capital and annual production’.

This is the sort of thing which Gordon Brown says today. But Ricardo added that it is ‘certain’ that, but for taxation, this prosperity would have been ‘much greater’. Taxes force the taxed, among other things, to ‘make a corresponding diminution’ of their ‘consumption of the necessaries and luxuries of life’.

The workers who make those necessaries and luxuries become unemployed. Mr Brown’s present taxation is high enough eventually to make our goods less competitive in the world and Britons unemployed. This column is not a great one for economic statistics. But a friend who is says that a halfdecade or so ago our taxes were 5 per cent lower than Germany’s as a proportion of GDP. Now the figure is only 1 per cent. Germany is therefore becoming more competitive, with implications for British unemployment; and unemployment, from Weimar Germany to 1970s Britain, is one of the two great peacetime causes — the other being inflation — of a country’s instability.

But most of us suspect that the real reason for Mr Osborne’s lack of tax cuts is fear that the other parties will accuse the Tories of wanting to cut spending on health, education and so on. How to pay for those is, however, another subject. Enough to say in conclusion, then, that opposing tax cuts has nothing to do with ‘stability’.