Where’s the (organic) beef, Dave?
Anne McElvoy says that Cameron’s reluctance to speak precisely about his plans is annoying even those who want him to succeed Awell-regarded member of the Cameron cosa nostra sat opposite me at lunch last week. Others at the table included a leading tabloid editor, a charity boss, a clutch of top political broadcasters, a business editor and a couple of senior businessmen. The poor man had barely tackled his asparagus before the table turned on him. He was accused as the emissary of a cause which lacked substance, was intellectually vacuous, had failed to show clear reform intent, was unreliable, prone to PR spivvery and callow.
The table had no shared ideological stance. Some were natural New Labourites trying to work out if Mr Cameron is really the ‘heir to Blair’ and would complete those parts of the reforming job the Prime Minister had neglected or left too late. Some were driven by hostility to Gordon Brown’s profligacy and desperate for an alternative. What should cause some thought in Cameron Camelot is that the critique of Mr Cameron is now coming from outside the circles of Old Thatcherite believers. Martin Wolf in the Financial Times slams Cameronism as ‘empty at the centre’ and Mr Blair’s pro-reform biographer John Rentoul condemns the Budget response as ‘shrill and silly ... running out of puff’. A few weeks ago it was deeply unfashionable to have any doubts at all about Mr Cameron. His early period was a model of style and drive. But the charge that he lacks a definable vision or conviction is beginning to eat away at his reputation.
So far there has been no clear answer to this from the Cameron camp, except to point out that a major policy review is under way — it will report back next year — and that it is unreasonable and unwise to expect detailed announcements from a new leader so early in the electoral cycle. But while there is no need for us to know anything like all the detail at this stage, it is unwise to allow people to come to the early conclusion that there is no substance to the nearly new Tory leader.
Deft political strategists — of whom Mr Cameron is one — know when to stop and head off trouble. Now would be a good time to start. My friend at lunch subsequently admitted that Mr Cameron needs to enter ‘stage two’ of his leadership. ‘He has a very strong political character but maybe people don’t know that.’ Which is odd, as we know almost everything else about him, from Converse trainers, through his criticisms of aggressive chocolate-orange retail, to his personal wind turbine.
It is also odd that in his Budget reply he should have used the phrase the ‘analogue Chancellor in a digital world’. Now there’s an example of why politicians need to remind themselves to speak like human beings. Voters hearing it only once in passing simply wouldn’t know what he was on about. Some in the inner team thought that this analogy (which I am told was penned by the verbally gifted Times columnist Michael Gove) was a metaphor too far. Mr Cameron had last-minute doubts about it, but judged that it was a natural soundbite for the evening news and allowed it to stay. It would be interesting to know what women voters — who so far have liked the look of Mr Cameron — make of this way of speaking. To my ear, it sounds uncomfortably like New Tory ladspeak and grates in the way that Alastair Campbell’s footballing metaphors did.
The deeper problem Mr Cameron faces is that he has, in the words of a senior shadow Cabinet figure, ‘thrown a lot of weight off the sleigh to make it travel faster’ and must now add intellectual ballast and conviction. It is genuinely hard in politics to say nothing for a long time. Silence does not come over as mysterious or thoughtful: it just comes over as having nothing to say. On tax, I think Mr Cameron is absolutely right to jut out his chin and remain silent. But the public services are a different matter. They go to the heart of the voters’ instinctive questions when confronted with a new leader: ‘What sort of a creature are you?’ and ‘What did you come into politics to do (beyond getting into power)?’ So far, many of Mr Cameron’s positions are drawn in watercolours, not oils. We know, for instance, that he is genuinely concerned about green issues and that he is wisely making an asset of the ‘conserving Conservatives’. But he needs to set out more clearly what that amounts to in terms of his stance on nuclear power, wind farms and other less easy issues, as opposed to mere benevolence towards the planet.
One senior figure cites the decision this week to reverse previous policy on the Green Belt as an example of the leader ‘facing a hard choice’. ‘We are still a shire party and they really don’t like this,’ says one. ‘But Labour cannot be the only party to address the needs of first-time buyers. David knows he needs to leave his comfort zone and show he isn’t afraid to make the unpopular decisions as well as the ones that get the applause.’ The Cameron mindset on the major issues still assumes too readily that Labour makes the running. The honest position of his supporters on health, for instance, is that he ‘really’ favours a public–private mix but feels unable to change the public mood. That leaves them talking about reform in private while swearing undying loyalty to the existing NHS in public. But suppose Mr Cameron is right and any discussion on health is to be treated with the utmost caution. That makes education, a stronger Tory card, even more important as the means towards defining the sort of leader — or indeed prime minister — he will be.
I sense that Mr Cameron is coming across as too tepid on a subject of rising concern to middle-class voters and again, not just to the bring-back-grammars brigade, but to all of us who regard a commitment to vastly improving the way that secondary schools are run as an essential task for a post-Blair government. ‘We took a huge risk in backing New Labour on the trust schools,’ says one frontbencher. But that was essentially a calculation. It tells us virtually nothing about the new leader’s concerns about the state of the secondary education system. I would have suggested exploring that before committing baby Cameron to a state school. Beliefs first, PR second. Mr Cameron now needs to define his credentials as a meritocrat and the sponsor of achievement in education. He also has to sound as if he believes in it (we must hope he does), so merely farming it out to David Willetts to have a look at won’t quite do. It is far too valuable a territory to leave open to Mr Brown to occupy — and the Budget was the first sign that he is keen to engage his future opponent on this battlefield.
The first task of the new Conservative party was to explain that the party is changing. The next task is to explain more coherently what it is changing to. ‘I do think,’ says a Friend-of-Cameron when I rehearse the story of my lunch, ‘that what you’re describing is essentially a PR problem and we have to deal with it at that level.’ Oh dear.
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