Reasons for Mr Cameron to be cheerful as the summer holidays begin
FRASER NELSON Cordon Brown will not holiday abroad this summer. Not for him the allure of a Tuscan palace or the sunbeds of Sharm el-Sheikh. The Prime Minister has instead created perfect happiness inside his home in Fife: a room wired up to the 10 Downing Street computer system where he can monitor the government he now controls. He intends to do nothing else this month, save for a quick visit to the south coast. Besides, he already seems well on his way to his main summer destination — the implosion of the Conservative party.
In the space of a few weeks the opinion polls have turned around, and Labour has a seemingly impregnable nine-point lead. Mr Cameron's aides have been reduced to claiming that they will 'make history' by being the first Opposition party to win an election from such a disadvantage. David Davis is trying to stiffen the resolve of his shadow Cabinet colleagues, telling them how the greatest military victories were achieved by seizing opportunity in such moments of despair. From the Tory back benches, it is hard to see how this situation could be recovered.
Hard, but not impossible. Amid all the gloom, there are a few rays of light for the Conservatives — and the first of these is that the Brown bounce may be just that, and that his lead will dwindle as inexorably as John Major's. It is just a few weeks since the very same polls suggested Mr Brown was a surefire vote-loser, and the Tories were celebrating their capture of 900 council seats. The suddenness of this opinion poll reversal suggests an underlying volatility — although one shadow Cabinet member tells me 'you can expect us to be behind until Christmas'.
Mr Brown is dropping plenty of hints about an early election. His aides say work has started on the manifesto (as if he hadn't finished it himself months ago) and that fundraising is beginning for an autumn polling day. The more martial noises Labour makes about this, the more the Conservatives believe it is a ruse designed to force them to panic stations. A surprise election is hardly announced in advance. What this really shows us is a PM keeping his options open. Mr Brown knows he cannot take this opinion poll lead to the bank — and realises his luck may run out.
Most politicians, as a rule, have about three or four good ideas and get through them pretty quickly. So it may prove with Mr Brown. He has taken genuinely bold action on welfare, tightening criteria on lone parent benefits. Other ideas have been flakier, such as his plans for a uniformed border police. Mr Brown's best moves at the Treasury, such as Bank of England independence, were announced in the first few weeks — to be followed by the stealth taxes and the tax credits disaster. He has chosen the same blazing entrée this time, and it may be followed by the same dip.
The Tories should also remember that Mr Brown has dominated the news agenda since coming to 10 Downing Street, and his powers to do so will wane with every passing week. The Daily Mail (which has overtaken the Sun as No. 10's most important newspaper) is beginning to smell a large, whiskered rat. It is as if the Prime Minister has made a list of the newspaper's criticisms of the Blair years, a recent editorial complained, and is ticking them off one by one. It finished by tearing into Mr Brown's border patrol proposal.
Mr Cameron has meanwhile marked out solid Conservative ground from which to attack Mr Brown. The Prime Minister intends to sign the European Union treaty in October, for example, and its publication in English has proven it is almost identical to the constitution on which the British public were promised a referendum. The sense of injustice is palpable, and the Tories are firmly on the right side of a powerful argument. They should stay there, paying no heed to the metropolitan voices fearful of Eurosceptic politics.
The Tory leader's 'broken society' theme is also emerging as perhaps the most powerful critique of the Labour years. lain Duncan Smith's work has exposed Labour's most shameful failure — the way its welfare system has institutionalised, rather than alleviated, the worst poverty. Mr Cameron let this campaign drop after a few days, which was a mistake. This should be a day-to-day strategy deployed to embarrass the Brown government. Used properly, it could have a devastating effect for — in addressing the problems of incivility, the cost of welfare and the decline of social cohesion — it touches the lives of every voter.
For all the strategic setbacks, Britain's social and economic trends are blowing in a Conservative direction. The low faith in politicians is bad news for a statist like Mr Brown whose main mantra is `trust me'. It is good news for those who dare to espouse a properly Conservative mission to empower people by lowering taxes and giving them choice over schools and hospitals. Mr Cameron listed all these objectives in a BBC Radio One interview on Tuesday. Yet his best ideas remained buried under the phrase 'social responsibility' — the nebulous shorthand he has chosen for it all.
Mr Brown, meanwhile, wants to march on to this terrain and make it his own. His latest book Britain's Evetyday Heroes would make a truly ten-ifying holiday read for Mr Cameron. The Prime Minister declares that Burke's notion of the 'little platoons' are at the heart of his 'idea of Britain and Britishness': an example of ideological cross-dressing no less aggressive than the Cameroons' affection for Polly Toynbee. The PM goes on to profile 30 people who have succeeded where government has failed. And he enlists such people as 'partners' who should be respected and supported by government. From the high priest of state control this is, at the very least, strikingly new language.
For all its literary shortcomings, this is the book that Mr Cameron should have written — packed not with theory, but concrete examples of how community action overcomes the state's shortcomings. The Conservatives are on the right path with the 'social responsibility' agenda, which is why Mr Brown published this book in an attempt to head them off. The Prime Minister is brutally realistic about where he is most exposed. He will know better than anyone that opinion poll leads can quickly evaporate, and that he remains supremely vulnerable to a properly formed Tory attack.
Two years ago Mr Cameron headed for his summer holiday written off by opinion polls, his every initiative dismissed as a desperate attempt to revive a doomed leadership campaign. Then, his fortunes were revived by a single speech in Blackpool. When he returns from his fortnight in Brittany, he will have had time to reflect on what is needed to make an even more profound comeback in the same seaside town.
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