Will compassionate tax cuts win Tory hearts and minds?
Ireported here in the summer on the bid by the upmarket retailer Cameron and Osborne to take over the ailing Conservative party in competition with Davis’s, which prides itself on being the People’s Tory Store, especially in the North.
Davis’s was overwhelming favourite with the shareholders. Then, in October, Cameron and Osborne soared ahead as a result of a new line in compassionate lingerie or whatever. Davis’s executives announced a profits warning. But Cameron and Osborne will almost certainly add the Conservative party to the firm’s portfolio, which includes extensive property in Notting Hill and west London and, as most recently announced by both partners, an extensive drugs-counselling service. But Davis’s are putting up a fight. They now offer customers extensive tax cuts. Cameron and Osborne cannot take Conservative shareholders for granted. The shareholders like tax cuts. So Davis’s offer would have produced a meeting of top Cameron and Osborne executives, probably during a staff ‘motivational weekend’ in a Home Counties hotel.
Mr Osborne: ‘Well, I think we can agree that the first thing we must decide is how to respond to this Davis’s tax special offer.’ Mr Cameron: ‘Surely, we should offer tax cuts too.’ This brought an intervention from Francis Maude, the marketing director brought in from Portillo’s after that firm went out of business on the Tory High Street and switched to the column-building sector. ‘Only if they’re compassionate tax cuts,’ he said.
Mr Cameron: ‘Er, what are they, actually?’ Mr Maude: ‘Little ones.’ Mr Osborne: ‘But, if they’re little, who’s going to notice them?’ Mr Maude: ‘Exactly. We don’t want too many people noticing them. Otherwise they’ll think we’re a bunch of Tories.’ Mr Cameron: ‘But, Francis, we’re in the phase of our campaign when the only people we are after are a bunch of Tories: the shareholders. We can start proving we’re not when we’ve got control of them and are looking for customers.’ Mr Maude: ‘Ah, yes, I’d forgotten that. That’s the bit I’m looking forward to.’ Mr Cameron: ‘So I’m pretty chilled out about this Davis’s tax offer. I’ll just say — in code, of course — that David Davis, that ancient head of the firm, wants to chuck old people out of their tax-funded accommodation and on to the street, and stuff.’ Mr Maude: ‘I don’t think you should be as kind to him as that. He’s probably not against taxation when it comes to, for example, taxing gay marriage certificates.’ Mr Osborne: ‘No, Francis, I think Dave’s is the way forward for the time being.’ Mr Cameron: ‘Anything else we need worry about, George?’ Mr Osborne: ‘Well, yeah. Boris has just announced on Desert Island Discs that he’s going into politics.’ Mr Cameron: ‘What? Why isn’t he content to be MP for Henley?’ Mr Osborne: ‘He said he thought it will soon be time for him to choose. So if we win, he says he’d like to be a front-bench spokesman for agriculture or trade or something like that.’ Mr Cameron: ‘You mean, he intends to join our front bench?’ Mr Osborne: ‘Looks like it. What are we gonna do?’ Mr Cameron: ‘Well, I shall say that I think he has taken a brave and correct decision in the interests of country and party, and that I wish him well in whatever he turns his considerable talents to next, and that none of this is any reflection on his ability.’ Mr Osborne: ‘No, Dave. That’s what you say when he has to resign from the front bench again, not when he joins it again.’ Mr Cameron: ‘Oh, yes. I was jumping ahead a bit. Anything else?’ Mr Osborne: ‘Well, the really bad news is that Heffer’s column has arrived in the Daily Telegraph and he seems to have bottled out of being as nasty about you as he was in the Mail. The most offensive thing he’s written so far is to call you a matinée idol. That could actually help us with women, especially old ones — the only kind who’ll know what matinée idol means.’ Mr Cameron: ‘This is disastrous. Weren’t we relying on Heffer to be our Clause 4? Charles Moore may have to be our new one. We could call him Clause Moore.’ Mr Osborne: ‘Ha, ha. Good line. Trouble is, Moore’s more or less just come out for us.’ Mr Cameron: ‘He’s a real, proper Tory who like me went to Eton. Have you any good news at all, George?’ Nonetheless, the meeting showed that, overall, morale at Cameron and Osborne is high.
Mr Portillo, addressing the Cambridge memorial service on Saturday for the great Tory Peterhouse historian Maurice Cowling, well conveyed what it was like to come under Maurice’s spell. He was his pupil, and so in a way was I, without first taking the trouble of winning admission to a university.
Mr Portillo said words to the effect that Maurice enjoyed plotting to make a Master of a college as much as he enjoyed plotting against him once he got his candidate in; presumably a reference to the late Hugh TrevorRoper (Lord Dacre), Maurice’s candidate for Master of Peterhouse, and later candidate for deposition from that office.
I like to think that I was also, in the same unacademic way, a pupil of Trevor-Roper, though I only knew him relatively late in his life. I once told him that Tory Cowling and Whig Trevor-Roper were alike, which was why I could admire both.
‘I must say I’m astonished,’ he replied. I claimed that, while Hugh was on the face of it the more establishment figure, both of them liked puncturing self-importance and pomposity, and that the big difference between them was religion, Maurice being Christian and Trevor-Roper not. Was I right? He replied, ‘Totally wrong, I would say. Maurice is a total cynic. I am not.’ Still, I suggested that he had more respect for Maurice than for many of the other right-wing Peterhouse dons whom Trevor-Roper, on becoming Master, soon detested. ‘My respect for Maurice was limited,’ he replied. He added that he quite enjoyed his company. ‘That is really all.’ That seemed to be rather a big thing to enjoy about someone.
Hugh would talk a lot, and amusingly, about the dons who were Maurice’s allies against him. Did they tend to be Christians? I always asked. ‘You keep going back to this question of Christians,’ he once replied. ‘One of them was a parson but whether he was a Christian I don’t know.’ I suspect that this was a reference to the distinguished Dr Edward Norman, who led the prayers at Maurice’s memorial service. Hugh would have relished the occasion.
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