Beneath the radar, the Tory party is working on a strategy to win by a landslide
These are bad times for Conservatives fighting the tightest marginal seats. About a year ago they were given generous resources to help them campaign, to promote their candidates and to rubbish Labour in general. Now, the cash is drying up. Unofficially, these target seats are being designated as ‘in the bag’ and the money instead is being diverted to constituencies that, preCameron, were regarded as utterly unwinnable. No one in Conservative headquarters is calling it by its name — to do so would court the lethal charge of complacency — but what is being discreetly developed is nothing less than a landslide strategy.
This explains the energy with which the Crewe by-election was fought. It was the 165th most winnable seat, situated on terrain traditionally inhospitable to Conservatives. From the outset, David Cameron was pessimistic about his prospects, fearing that his party was either cursed in by-elections, or simply unable to fight on the ground with the precision and ferocity of the Liberal Democrats. ‘They like campaigning in the same way that our members like doing lunch,’ one senior Cameroon told me, summing up the gloom early on in the campaign.
Yet if there is to be a Tory landslide (the latest YouGov opinion poll suggests a Tory majority of 194) then Crewe needs to be a permanent gain. This means the Tory general election strategy must switch from a marginal seat campaign to one reaching out to places that even Thatcher failed to take. So the Crewe campaign became a proxy — albeit surreptitiously so — for an exploratory landslide strategy.
Each member of the shadow Cabinet was ordered to make the pilgrimage to Crewe at least three times. In my brief visit there I saw more senior politicians mulling around than can be found in any Commons bar on a normal day — Jack Straw trebling the police presence with his entourage and Mr Cameron himself becoming the temporary town mascot. The Tories achieved numerical supremacy, and usually went home encouraged. But those party campaigners based in the constituency, rather than making flying visits, report deeper anxieties.
The main concern is that the Tories’ campaign successes were based on a negative theme — ‘send a message to Brown’. There was no new Tory message being lapped up by the voters, just an opportunity to mine the Prime Minister’s ever-deepening unpopularity. ‘I won over waverers by telling them they can vote Labour at the general election,’ says one Tory campaign director. ‘Families on low incomes ask how we’ll make them better off, and we have no answer.’ It will simply not do for the Conservatives to come back in June 2010 without an answer to this most basic of questions. If the problem was only hazily perceived by Cameron HQ before, it has become clearer now. One shadow Cabinet member says that the Tories have grasped the ‘Thursday night mealtime’ scenario — the problem facing cash-strapped families who must skimp on dinner before payday if the money has been particularly tight that week. The only meaningful pledge to make to such families — the only thing that they want to hear from the Tories — is that they will be less hard up under a different government.
The opposition to upfront tax cut pledges from Cameron HQ is total. Steve Hilton, his chief adviser, slaps down talk of tax cuts at every opportunity — keen to deny this potentially fractious debate the chance to gather momentum. ‘The Cameron policy is “steady as she goes and let Brown keep sinking”,’ says one shadow minister. The counter argument to this is that a landslide — if achieved — also carries with it the rare opportunity to enact radical change: in this instance, to reverse the tax-raising strategy for which Mr Brown has been responsible.
It is undeniably true that Mr Cameron’s gambit has annoyed the Brownites. ‘Their strategy has been to hug us, not fight us,’ moans one Cabinet member. ‘That does mean we do have difficulty drawing dividing lines.’ But as the economy sours, and inflation is magnified by the mysteriously unremarked-upon collapse of the pound, the case for breaking with Mr Brown’s economic policy gathers.
As it happens, it may be Labour which first breaks free from Mr Cameron’s unwanted embrace. Since Boris Johnson’s victory there has been much evidence of Labour returning to the left. There is something about the Mayor of London which arouses Labour’s baser instincts — here is someone not in the least ashamed about his background, who has been elected in spite of it. He acts as a blond matador, tempting out Labour’s bullish inner demons which Tony Blair tried to keep at bay. The ‘toff’ line of attack is back.
It was revived to ignominious effect at Crewe, where Labour activists dressed in top hats to deride the wealth of Edward Timpson, the Tory candidate. That he was later found to be no more grand than any other old boy of Manchester Grammar is par for the course. As Tories know, when an opinion poll lead disappears, party discipline soon follows. The ‘toff’ jibes, together with the new restive mood in the Commons and the shriller voices on the abortion debate, suggest that Labour is now moving inexorably to the left.
To suggest that this has been orchestrated by 10 Downing Street is to exaggerate the control the Prime Minister exerts over his party. Stephen Carter, who has organised Mr Brown’s recent forays on to the internet, is understood to be aghast at the class war line of attack. But if the Labour rank and file is hunting for dividing lines with Mr Cameron’s Conservatives, it will keep moving in this direction.
Here lies Mr Cameron’s opportunity. It was Labour’s departure to the outer reaches of left-wing politics in the 1980s that emboldened the Thatcher government and allowed it to enact the economic reform which so transformed this country. If Labour moves leftwards, so Mr Cameron could find he has the space he needs to offer low-income voters a meaningful choice on election day by pledging to cut their taxes.
Mr Cameron remains wary of hubris, and reproaches colleagues who sound too optimistic. ‘I’m superstitious!’ he exclaimed in shadow Cabinet recently, when the mood became too buoyant. But as one senior party strategist puts it, ‘the earth moved on the day of the local elections’. Labour has a leader so unpopular they dare not use his photograph or even his name on election literature. And he is determined to stay for two more years hoping — like John Major and Mr Micawber before him — that something will turn up.
One might argue that Mr Cameron does not deserve this opportunity, has not earned it. But it is his anyway. He is astute enough to distinguish between the brutal wave of hostility to Gordon Brown rippling across the nation in May 2008, and bankable support for his own party two years hence. The difference between a workable Tory majority and a Tory landslide may well depend on the extent to which he can assure low-income voters in places like Crewe, with robust policy promises, that they will be better off under the Conservatives. Mr Cameron has a year — at most — in which to decide if this is a gamble he is willing to take.
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