Now Cameron is positioning himself as the heir to George W. Bush
At the heart of David Cameron’s project for the Tory party is admiration for Tony Blair: his techniques, style, language and personality cult. This reverence for the Prime Minister extends far beyond mere form to embrace substantial policy issues. It is well known that David Cameron agrees with Tony Blair’s insights into public-service reform, while insisting that he could apply them with greater courage and forcefulness. The resulting pledge to support next year’s Education Bill has been greeted with hostility from Cameron’s leadership rival David Davis: so much so that it is now hard to see how Davis could fit at all comfortably into the front-bench team Cameron will form after his inevitable victory on 6 December.
Cameron’s eagerness to copy Blairite policies stretches well beyond domestic policies like education. Its most significant manifestation is in foreign affairs. The deeper the reservations felt by Labour backbenchers about the Prime Minister’s allegiance to President George Bush, the more thoroughgoing Cameron’s own support becomes.
Cameron’s allies say truthfully (I have verified their assertions independently) that David Cameron expressed certain private reservations, which flowed from a naturally conservative wariness about ambitious projects for the remaking of society, before casting his vote in favour of war in Iraq. Since then, however, his position has changed. In July Cameron threw his weight behind the nonsensical and now discredited Tony Blair claim that there was no link between the London bombings and the war in Iraq. On 24 August he made a speech on ‘British values’ which described the socalled war on terror in the apocalyptic terms used only by George Bush’s fervent admirers.
On Tuesday night David Cameron’s lieutenant, the Times columnist turned Tory MP Michael Gove, hosted a reception in the House of Commons for the Henry Jackson Project for Democratic Geopolitics. Though a handful of left-wing figures were present — among them the Labour MP Gisela Stuart and Blairite polemicist John Lloyd the tone was Conservative. Brendan Simms, co-president of the Henry Jackson Project, is senior history fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge: the post which was used with such conspiratorial charm by the late Maurice Cowling to shape the last generation of Conservative politicians.
The Henry Jackson ginger group (its patrons embrace many of the stars of the American neoconservative firmament, including Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle and James Woolsey: Jackson, a Democrat congressman, was one of the original neocons) is knocking at an open door in David Cameron’s Conservative party. Cameron’s strategists Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey threw their weight behind the Cambridge launch of the Jackson project earlier this year. Even more to the point, the team of senior Tories who now look certain to occupy the most senior shadow Cabinet positions after David Cameron becomes leader — William Hague, Liam Fox and George Osborne are all profoundly sympathetic to the evangelical liberal democracy which Tony Blair and George W. Bush have patented. As Osborne remarked in The Spectator on 28 February 2004, ‘I’m a signed-up, card-carrying Bush fan. I have been ever since I met him when he was governor of Texas.’ There seems no question at all that just as Tony Blair prepares to leave the political scene in Britain, forced out in significant part because of public hostility to his proAmerican foreign policy, the Conservative party under David Cameron is ready to occupy the vacant space. It is as if a man, observing a friend jump off a very high cliff to certain death, resolved at once to jump after him. On the face of things this is mad. Being the ‘heir to Tony Blair’ — as Cameron rashly boasted over a private dinner with the Daily Telegraph last month — is daring enough. Positioning oneself as the heir to George W. Bush is yet more reckless. But perhaps Cameron is taking risks on a matter of principle.
It must be assumed that — like Tony Blair — he has been convinced by the Bush project. Cameron is self-consciously placing himself within a discernible, honourable and at times extremely courageous tradition of Tory magnates who have pursued a forwardlooking foreign policy. He is following in the footsteps of Canning, the foreign secretary who liberated much of South America from Spanish rule; Churchill in 1940; Eden and his Suez adventure. As William Hague reminds us in his biography of the Younger Pitt, William Wilberforce was the first Tory interventionist. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 was the earliest example of an ethical foreign policy, prosecuted by the Royal Navy, raising all manner of complexities to do with international law, bitterly resented by the Barbary states.
There is a second, more pessimistic vein of Conservative thinking on foreign policy. It was represented in this year’s leadership election by Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Kenneth Clarke, both soundly defeated. They, too, can lay claim to a grand Tory philosophical tradition: a sense of the intractability of events; a consequent despair at ever being able to influence them, except for the worse; a suspicion of great enterprises and abstract schemes for human improvement. The great Conservative foreign secretary and prime minister Lord Salisbury (whose official biographer Andrew Roberts is, curiously, a neoconservative) expressed this point of view most powerfully of all. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes there must be some remedy for every political ill, and, rather than not find it, will make two hardships to cure one,’ he wrote in 1872. He went on: ‘May it not, on the contrary, be our incessant doctoring and meddling, awaking the passions now of this party, now of that, raising at every step a fresh crop of resentments by the side of the old growth, that puts off the day when these feelings will decay quietly away and be forgotten.’ Lord Salisbury was writing about Ireland, but were he alive today he might feel that his scepticism about the effects of human actions, however well-intentioned, was vindicated by the mess in Iraq. But David Cameron and his new Conservatives are optimists who believe that they will create the world afresh: good luck to them.
Previous page
