Training | 2009.10.13
Be full of sound and fury, but signify next to nothing | Simon Jenkins
Conference season 09: The election is in David Cameron\'s pocket. He has created a winning personality. But all this policy talk is sheer folly
British politics is now about David Cameron. It is not about the Conservative party or Gordon Brown or the war or Europe or welfare reform. It is about an engaging, inexperienced, 42-year-old former public relations man who has exorcised the curse of unpopularity that lay on his four predecessors as Tory leader. The election to be held next year is his only to lose.
A long conceit of British politics is that personality is undignified. It is American or French or Russian, something below the political salt, democracy\'s original sin. Proper public life should be above such vanity fare, and deal in parties, manifestos, platforms and policies. When, three years ago, Cameron was elected leader and lauded as a Tory Tony Blair, his party shuddered. Had not Blair smashed his once mighty party, eviscerated its ideology and made it his private army? Would Cameron do likewise? Perish the thought, would he actually go out and court popularity?
I remember Cameron\'s response. What was wrong with being heir to Blair, he said. "He did win three elections, you know." Leading a party that had revelled in congenital defeatism, Cameron seemed fresh and to the point. He wanted to win. As Machiavelli wrote, a leader can be as moral of purpose as he likes but if he cannot gain power and "maintain the state", moral purpose is for the winds.
Cameron\'s first two years were hesitant. His poll rating seemed stuck below 40% and he could not open clear water from Labour. The Conservative party was unconvinced of his substance and, on marker policies such as Europe, welfare and crime, dubious of his reliability. By 2007 he faced rumbles of discontent.
Party unity and personal authority are hard to sustain in opposition. As she recalled in her diaries, Margaret Thatcher was close to despair in 1978-9. Her colleagues openly doubted that she would ever enter Downing Street. In contrast, Cameron performed well. He did not panic in adversity. He held to his strategy of "detoxifying" the party of Thatcherite nastiness through gestures towards huskies , hoodies , localism and "social responsibility". He held loyal to a cabal of advisers whose background was easy to ridicule but whose cohesion and competence have stood the test of time.
Cameron\'s one serious achilles heel has been policies, not their absence but their specificity. Blair went into the 1997 election with hardly a policy to his name. His campaign was a confection of feel-good vacuities, of words such as faith, trust, confidence, covenant and change. It was the doctrine of the 19th-century philosopher Max Weber that the ideal democratic leader of the future should be "romantic, charismatic, activist". He should inspire in his followers a belief that he knows the right thing to do, without saying what it might be.
The reason, said Weber, was "occasionalism", the habit of circumstances conspiring to alter cases. The ideal leader does not force events into the straitjacket of policies, but grasps at them and turns them to his advantage. However much the press may clamour, policy is for addicts in backrooms.
In Manchester this week Cameron and his colleagues have taken grave risks. Where Blair issued postcard pledges, to halve this or double that, Cameron has allowed his spokesmen to go public with specific proposals for spending cuts, care homes, welfare reform, school upheaval and postponed pensions. The idea has been to convey plausibility and competence, but the hostages to fortune are legion.
The financing of Cameron\'s ideas on care homes has already been shot full of holes. His council tax freeze is a silly, crowd-pleasing denial of resources to local government. His desire to increase the prison population is antediluvian, his wish for more "choice" in hospitals and schools archaic and costly. Thatcher suffered grievously for her 1979 pledge to honour public sector wage rises. Cameron may yet suffer for the pledge of his Treasury spokesman, George Osborne, to cut them, when he could have pleaded the doctrine of unripe time.
The Tories do not have to convince voters that they are responsible or competent. They can leave Gordon Brown to convince voters that he is not, and offer instead a leader with whom the electorate can feel comfortably at home for the next four or five years. Cameron\'s aura of slightly foppish inexperience is surely preferable to a procession of shadow ministers banging their tin-can policies and inviting lobbyists to attack them at every turn. Their pledges merely saddle a Tory government with the odium of U-turn and reversal. By pledging to cut Whitehall "by a third", Cameron advertises his inexperience. He never will.
There are no longer great issues dividing politics. The Tories, having won the last ideological battle of the 20th century, remain bereft of ideas for the next. That is why polarised political debate is so tiresome to the public and why parties fare so badly. The constitution strives for the appeal of celebrity not out of idleness but because only celebrity allows people to pry beneath the carapace of power, to judge what sort of person they want to rule their lives.
Such explicit personality explains the stardom accorded to Cameron\'s only rival in his party\'s affection, Boris Johnson, presidential mayor of London. He is the new politics, dangerous to Cameron, which is why the party dumped him on a fast train to London.
Cameron should have the election in his pocket. He has succeeded crucially in becoming more popular than his party, which many centre voters still regard with comparative distaste. In this week\'s Populus poll in the Times, he led Brown on each area of economic management by more than his party led Labour.
Conservatism remains an incubus for Cameron in his appeal to the "undistributed middle" of voters. He must contrive to do what both Thatcher and Blair did, and "run against" his party\'s image. But that is why he should beware of needlessly controversial policies and controversial colleagues, both rearing their unattractive heads in Manchester. What was supposed to be an exercise in promiscuous responsibility became an exercise in nerdish self-indulgence.
Leadership is all. As for Labour Brown is all, so for the Tories Cameron is all. When he stands up on Thursday for surely his last conference speech as opposition leader, he can be full of sound and fury, but should signify little or nothing. Why take the risk? Remember Machiavelli.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ence-david-cameron-machiavelli
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