How Cameron plans to profit from the war between Blair and Brown
Almost exactly two years have passed since Michael Howard was drafted in as emergency leader of the Conservative party. He has done the job he was asked to do. He took over at a moment of traumatic collapse. He administered first aid and gradually brought the victim back to life. In due course colour returned to its cheeks, and it was able to sit up in bed. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of Dr Howard, the patient is now taking tentative, unaided first steps.
The recovery is by no means assured. But Howard’s own role is over. His final act was bravest of all. When he suddenly announced that he was stepping down as leader last May, everyone thought that he had made a foolish and reprehensibly selfindulgent mistake. Sandra Howard spent the car journey to Putney, where the announcement was made, imploring her husband to stay on. Rachel Whetstone, Howard’s political adviser, fully supported these pleas, ruthlessly breaking down in tears in a dramatic final attempt to change his mind.
But Howard has been vindicated. Against the odds, the long period of Conservative party introspection that followed his resignation has done nothing but good. It has engendered a lively and important debate. Conservatives are interesting again. Above all, David Cameron, Howard’s chosen candidate, has used the intervening eight months to establish himself as a major presence on the national stage. It is easy to sneer at Cameron for his youth, his brashness, his social ease. The truth is that his achievement is massive. He has suddenly become the most intriguing figure in British politics, with the power to reshape the political landscape and dominate British public life for two decades. The opportunities which will open up to him after his election as Conservative party leader this Tuesday are boundless.
His achievement is more remarkable for the fact that he is to a large extent his own man. Tony Blair, when he suddenly became leader of the opposition in 1994, was scarcely more than the creature of his advisers. He was incapable of delivering a public utterance without being instructed by Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell, and did not even begin to escape the grip of these actor-managers for several years after entering Downing Street. The greatest tragedy of Tony Blair is that he has always been the instrument of somebody else’s political vision — Gordon Brown’s in his very early days, Mandelson’s in the middle years, and George W. Bush’s towards the end.
At just 39, Cameron is two years younger than Tony Blair was at the time of John Smith’s death. But he is not a mere vehicle for his advisers in the way that Blair was. Certainly some fairly clever people surround Cameron — his lieutenants Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey, the advertising expert Steve Hilton and above all ex-shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin, who is expected to lead the intellectually hugely ambitious policy review that will energise Cameron’s Conservative party in opposition. They have worthwhile roles, but will not dominate the leader. I have known David Cameron for 15 years and judge that he has a definite sense of personal identity, something that Tony Blair has always lacked. For that reason I don’t think Cameron will ever allow himself to be bamboozled, as Blair has been, by very rich or powerful men.
David Cameron has arrived at the centre of the political stage at a time of chronic weakness for the Prime Minister, whose power has been draining away for months. The process may not be reversible. The latest demonstration of Tony Blair’s political impotence is Adair Turner’s grand proposals for pension reform. Downing Street was trying hard, as The Spectator went to press, to save something from the wreckage of Lord Turner’s document, the product of years of hard work. But all efforts are doomed to failure in the face of the bitter hostility of the Treasury. Exactly the same cause will doom Tony Blair’s hopes of reforming welfare, health, education and, for that matter, anything else relating to long-term domestic policy.
One ally of the Chancellor told me recently that he believed that Tony Blair was pursuing a ‘scorched earth’ strategy in his last few months or years at No. 10 rendering the terrain uninhabitable for his successor. Good sources tell me that relations between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are now as bad as they have ever been — in other words, ghastly.
This murderous death-struggle between Blair and Brown engulfs Whitehall and Westminster as Cameron prepares to become leader of the opposition on Tuesday. He and his ally George Osborne have thought carefully and intelligently about how to make best use of this civil war at the heart of government. Their plan is to place the Conservative party above the fray. Cameron’s Tories will stand up for the national interest, in sharp contrast to the senseless back-stabbing and blood feuds on the Labour front benches. On many issues — education reform being one, in all likelihood Lord Turner’s pension proposals another — Cameron will come down in favour of Tony Blair.
This strategy, though informed by high principle, has a low tactical advantage. If successful, Cameron will be able to play the Prime Minister like a salmon, at times letting out line, allowing him to pursue his own trajectory and swim downstream, at other times exerting discipline by reeling him in closer to shore, before eventually landing the prize, perhaps at a moment Cameron himself chooses. He enjoys one astonishing strategic advantage: he and Chancellor Gordon Brown share a common interest in the destruction of Tony Blair. The success of Cameron’s first few months as leader will be determined in part by how skilfully he makes use of this unspeakable alliance.
It will be much harder for Cameron than it was for Tony Blair 11 years ago. Labour had a commanding 15-point lead in the polls in 1994, while today’s Tories still lag behind. The Conservative government had been utterly destroyed by Black Wednesday and could do no more than limp to the end. That is not the case with Labour in 2005. Nevertheless, for the first time in many years, a new Conservative party leader has emerged with a genuine chance of entering Downing Street. Michael Howard has earned the gratitude of his party, and perhaps his place in history, by doing the essential preliminary work and by securing the base through the restoration of order and unity. Howard did the negative part of the job. His protégé David Cameron faces the infinitely more challenging business of recreating the Conservatives as a national, popular and dominant political party.
He is untried, faces many problems, and may well fail. But it is very cheering, and furthermore tremendous fun, to be a Conservative this weekend.
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