David Cameron follows in the footsteps of Benjamin Disraeli
Ihad resolved on no account whatever to return to the theme of the Tory leader, David Cameron, this week. Other issues looked more pressing. The decision by Liberal Democrat MPs to destroy Charles Kennedy only months after he had led them to their most impressive general election result in three quarters of a century is an instance of black ingratitude with few parallels in recent political history. It cries out for an explanation.
Kennedy does not merely deserve some credit for his electoral success. It weighs greatly in his favour that he is one of the disturbingly small number of British politicians to have made a public issue out of claims that Britain has been complicit in the shameful policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, an American euphemism for the extraction of information from prisoners by dispatching them to countries which practise torture. The government maintains that it knows nothing of this latest accretion to the worldwide outsourcing business. These protestations are falling apart. At the weekend, for example, the Observer blew a hole in Foreign Office denials that British officials were present at a rigorous examination of some terrorist suspects in a Greek jail.
Meanwhile the Prime Minister is back from his annual freebie holiday in Egypt. (Doubtless it is pure coincidence that this country is one of the most popular destinations for ‘rendered suspects’.) Following advice from Peter Mandelson, still the most influential figure in Downing Street, Tony Blair has produced a new strategy for keeping Gordon Brown at bay. This became necessary after the collapse of the old one. For the first seven years of his premiership Tony Blair’s preferred tactic was deceit: repeated assurances to the Chancellor that he would step down at some specified future date, assurances that in every case turned out to be worthless.
That method is busted, and it appears that the Prime Minister has resorted to blackmail. I am told he is threatening to disrupt the premiership of Gordon Brown by publicly agitating for the Blairite reform agenda, unless he is allowed to leave Downing Street in his own good time, with legacy assured and dignity intact. These negotiations have created an uneasy mood, which means that the next 12 months will be extremely messy for the government. The local council elections this May are starting to take on a bigger than normal significance. They have the potential to provide the decisive jolt that will put paid to Charles Kennedy, to Tony Blair, or both.
These matters all demand meticulous analysis. Sadly, they will have to wait till another day. There is no avoiding David Cameron. He has struck over the Christmas period with the full force of a typhoon. The sheer audacity and confidence of the man is dazzling. Six months ago, when he was making the early presentations in his leadership campaign, there was no hint that he could be as brave, as agile or as creative as this. He is performing like a great general, marshalling limited resources to attack the enemy in the places where he expects it least, chasing and harrying, constantly on the lookout for fresh ways to press home his advantage, causing mayhem, bafflement and consternation among his opponents.
Cameron has devoted himself to an incredible project: outflanking New Labour from the Left. He has torn up 30 years of Conservative party policy positions in three weeks. He has renounced the Thatcherite inheritance. On the environment, poverty, aid for the Third World, the health service, even wealth redistribution, Cameron has launched the Conservative party deep into territory long considered the exclusive property of New Labour. His followers are for the most part transfixed with amazement, unable to take it all in. But the Conservative party Right, a faction which made the party unelectable in the 1990s and has a settled determination to remain in opposition for the indefinite future, has already started to agitate against Cameron, in particular through the unlikely medium of the comment and City pages of the Daily Telegraph.
The charges made — that Cameron has betrayed immutable Conservative principles, is focused on presentation, and lacks substance — are serious ones which deserve to be answered. The first charge simply manifests a failure to understand the long and often torrid history of the Tory party. It is hard to understand what Cameron is trying to do without reading Robert Blake’s masterful biography of Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was faced with an uncannily similar predicament to Cameron’s: a mainly booming economy and a strong progressive government which had captured middle-class opinion. Most troubling of all was the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, a Conservative in everything but name, and a formidable expo nent of the art of consensus politics who nevertheless devoted almost all his time to pursuing an expansionist foreign policy.
There were two schools of thought about how to cope with this unpromising state of affairs. The ultras, whose most articulate spokesman was Lord Cranborne (few predicted that he was later, as Lord Salisbury, to become a very successful prime minister), advocated wholehearted resistance to any kind of change whatsoever. As Blake bleakly noted, this policy had one serious snag: ‘it offered no hope of political power’.
The alternative was full-blooded engagement with modernity. Disraeli disconcerted Palmerston by supporting him against his rebellious Liberal supporters. Then, when Palmerston died, he outflanked his successor Gladstone altogether over parliamentary reform, creating the conditions for the Conservative political domination in the century that followed. Disraeli understood one thing very well, and Cameron understands it too. The Conservative party is not merely an efficient instrument of power, as it has been understood by one important tradition of Tory leaders, extending from Robert Peel to Edward Heath and beyond. It also offers a dream, in its way as potent and admirable as Martin Luther King’s, of how the world should be governed and human beings should be organised. Conservatism also has profound obligations to secure what Disraeli called the ‘social welfare of the people’ and not just seek to satisfy the material aspirations of the already comfortably off.
Within this grand tradition Cameron’s remarkable project — his attacks on the damage done by naked capitalism, his insistence on a sustainable environment, his concern about child poverty, his unhesitating commitment to a national health service free at the point of delivery — makes complete sense. It is not absurd or premature to start to make this comparison with Disraeli, the greatest of Tory politicians. In a very short space of time David Cameron has demonstrated the same poise, scope and towering ambition. He too is set on taking the Tory party back to Middle Britain and making it once again the natural party of government. He too is determined to recreate the political landscape. He has taken massive risks and, of course, in the end he may fail. But he will not fail for lack of courage, martial spirit or a true Conservative vision. He is a joy to behold.
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