The damage that the Conservatives have sustained over recent weeks goes well
beyond the sharp reduction in their opinion poll lead. Gordon Brown’s
rehabilitation as a supposedly competent man of action has blown apart the
Tories’ election strategy and no plan B exists.
For a full year after the prime minister failed at his party’s 2007 conference
to call an election, the Conservative narrative depicted him as a ditherer
who had failed the test of the highest office. One suspects that Peter
Mandelson whispered a similar analysis into George Osborne’s ear when they
met on holiday in Corfu this summer. The representation of Brown as a
procrastinator was credible and almost universally accepted. As his poll
ratings plummeted to below those of John Major in the 1990s, the Tories had
only to wait for office to be delivered to them on a plate.
During that period their worst fear was not yet realised. They had been
anxious that as the economy deteriorated the public would turn to Brown as
the man of experience, or at least the devil they knew. But voters showed no
sign of switching as the government lurched through a series of blunders
over Northern Rock. If that was a honeymoon for the Conservatives, they
squandered it by failing to pin on Brown the blame for Britain’s economic
woes. Instead his excuse that the UK was the victim of problems born in the
United States just about prevailed.
When, in early October, three British banks approached the government for a
capital injection, it was seized by panic. The news was leaked and the
banks’ shares dropped alarmingly. Following confusion and shambolic allnight
sessions, the government agreed to risk colossal amounts of taxpayers’ money
by buying bank shares.
By then Mandelson was back in the cabinet and the government attempted the
boldest spin in modern history. The crisis in the British economy and the
gambling of billions of pounds of the public’s money were to be presented as
a triumph. Notwithstanding that the global crisis is largely the product of
inappropriate expansionist policies pursued in Washington and Whitehall, and
ignoring the blatant irresponsibility of some British banks (which took
their cue from Brown’s fiscal imprudence as chancellor), and overlooking
that Brown had removed from the Bank of England the job of regulating those
banks, the government’s sweaty response to the City’s financial catastrophe
was portrayed as the model for action across the world.
Incredibly the ploy worked. In a situation where bankers, economists,
journalists and politicians had no idea what was happening, it was enough
that Brown did something - even if unthinkingly forced into it - and he won
the accolades. Everyone is entitled to his luck; politics and logic have
always been strangers. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the
Tories have been left gaping.
I make public speeches. After Brown’s failure to call an election, just to use
the words “political courage” and the prime minister’s name in a single
sentence set people hooting with laughter. If I try linking the two now,
people think I am serious.
If voters think Brown is a decisive leader and don’t believe that he caused
the mess we are in, then the Tories have real problems. The other card that
they can play is “character”, an issue that David Cameron addressed at his
party conference. That play ought to work, because even if Brown has
convinced many people that he has saved the planet, he remains curmudgeonly
and ill at ease. By contrast, Cameron looks comfortable in his skin and
remains generally relaxed and friendly under pressure.
However, Brown’s personality traits are less in focus now. The Labour party
has put away any idea of a leadership contest and David Miliband has given
up his undeclared challenge. The Tories, meanwhile, have been laid low by
Osborne’s contact with Oleg Deripaska. As Major learnt when he campaigned to
get back to basics, you need to be sure of your own purity before you decide
to fight on character. Osborne behaved unwisely and for days the press have
carried excruciating photographs of him at Oxford’s club for rich boys, the
Bullingdon.
Of course, having a public school education is a crime only for Conservative
leaders. After all, Tony Blair went to Fettes, Oxford and the bar. Yet the
Tories are pigeonholed as irredeemable toffs, even though Cameron is their
first public-school leader since Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down in 1965.
By wooing an inappropriate donor, Osborne is badly damaged just when the party
needs him in match form. The Corfu caper is a particular calamity because he
is in fact modest and unpretentious. Cameron must be sorely disappointed
with him, and that is unfortunate because they and William Hague have
constituted one of the most closely knit - and therefore effective -
political cabals of modern times.
Brown has capitalised on Tory grief by setting the party a dilemma. At every
election while he was chancellor he outwitted the Tories by proposing to
increase public expenditure. The Conservatives could denounce his fiscal
indiscipline and so be accused of “slashing” public services; or they could
match the government’s promises and so demoralise their supporters. Still,
the Tories assumed the problem would not recur at the next election because
the government was already struggling to hold down the growing national debt.
Brown thinks this card can be played again. With all his fiscal rules bust, he
thinks he has nothing to lose. Employing Orwellian subtlety, his slogan has
been amended to: prudence good, profligacy better. The Conservatives, he
says, fail to understand that you have to borrow in a recession. That is not
true. What they did not understand is why Brown had to borrow during a
prolonged boom.
Not everything is going according to plan for Brown, however. The pound has
dropped like a stone. Investors don’t believe that Britain is uniquely well
placed to weather the storm, as he claims. Given the immense part played in
the UK economy by financial services, pounds will continue to be sold.
It is odd how media fixations change. At one time, if the pound had lost a
quarter of its value against the dollar, the prime minister would be
searching for a new job. Not long ago public borrowing figures such as those
announced last week would have put the skids under the chancellor. Brown’s
successful spin is to convince the media that the crisis is all but over and
the time has come to devote their attention to pressing matters such as
Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand.
Even Mandelson’s antics served to bump the economy off the front page. You
might think that while he was a European commissioner, his inappropriate
contacts with Deripaska would arouse a storm and suggest that Brown’s
judgment in reappointing him was flawed. But the tide is running Brown’s way
and he is not being pressed. Mandelson can deny any wrongdoing because the
commission conducts itself by a laughably lax code of conduct.
After I was accused of dithering for not entering the Tory leadership election
in 1995, I made the opposite mistake by launching myself precipitately into
the contest in 2001. Brown shows signs of the same syndrome. The man who
last year could not decide to go to the country now makes six imprudent
decisions before breakfast.
Be ready for an early election. The economy will sink lower throughout 2009
and before long we will start to forget that Brown saved the world. He ought
to call a vote sooner rather than later. Yesterday’s man of caution has
become today’s reckless gambler.
