THERE’S SOMETHING of the Harry Potter about David Cameron: the boy wizard seems able to do no wrong. He has magicked up an exciting battle from what looked like a half-hearted contest among the dregs of a half-dead Tory party.
It hasn’t come without price. The Cameron campaign team has been shaken by what they see as a dirty tricks campaign against their plucky young wizard over the past couple of weeks. For Cameron himself, who entered the contest only because his group of MPs was convinced that one modernising candidate had to, it has been baptism by firing squad.
Not only he but his close allies and family have been targeted. It was the media that determined to rake through claims of past drug use. But the Cameron team has seen Tory opponents play upon the rumours for their own gain. It has been an unedifying experience, one that has left Cameron and his allies shocked by the realisation of how nasty politics can be.
All of which serves to highlight the real deficiency in Cameron’s leadership bid: his lack of experience. The boy wizard has grown in stature in the past few weeks. He is undergoing one of those transformations that actually make a person look taller (but that might be because he appears to be rapidly losing weight under the strain). And I imagine, after surviving the first volley of attacks — what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that — that he feels taller too.
The Tory party has to go for Cameron now. You do not ignore the kind of momentum that he undoubtedly possesses. He has made Conservative politics interesting again, he is already winning people who wouldn’t have considered voting Tory for the past 20 years, and that’s a pretty impressive start. David Davis is personally persuasive, but a man who cannot inspire his own party in a conference hall is not going to be able to inspire the country, and his campaign has been trashy and arrogant. With Kenneth Clarke out of the contest, the Tories would be mad to back anyone but Cameron.
You do not have to push very far, however, to discover the wizard’s shortcomings. First there is policy: he doesn’t really have any to speak of. I have read and reread the Conservative modernisers’ creed; I have studied at the knee of our own Daniel Finkelstein, the great high master of modern Toryism; I have lain awake at night trying to get my head around the idea that Cameron must “be the change” and not just talk about the change.
And I can sort of see it. I can see that it is important for the Conservatives to look different and for their leader to embody that change, but in the end it does still boil down to this: has Cameron got any substance? He is looking great, he is sounding good — but what does it mean? It’s all a bit “Doe, a deer” to me — you know, “far, a long long way to run, sew, a needle pulling thread . . .” etc. Until the little girl looks up and says: “But it doesn’t mean anything!”
Cameron’s allies say that he recognises the need to flesh out his policy. Or some of them do. Others say he doesn’t need any policy, he just needs to embody change. I get the impression that they haven’t much more than the faintest idea what to do next. Push them in detail on any policy area and with the exception of education, where Cameron has been shadowing Ruth Kelly and has a pretty clear (if unremarkable) idea of where he wants to go, they flounder.
When Cameron has come up with something substantial — supporting marriage through the tax system, for instance, or flatter and lower taxes — it sounds pretty right-wing to me. On health he is just about where Labour is; in education he wants to improve standards and the examination system probably as a precursor to introducing some kind of voucher system; he is eurosceptic but not europhobic (isn’t everyone?); he wants to broaden foreign policy; he may push for compulsory pensions saving; and he would like to give some of the benefits of economic growth back to the electorate rather than spending them.
Which sounds nice, but the issue over the next few years is likely to be less who gets the goodies, more who gets the baddies: do you increase taxes or cut spending? Labour, impressed by the performance and style of Cameron, is asking how he can win on “their” ground: will he back the health service or lower taxes?
Fair enough, Cameron doesn’t need an answer to everything yet. He can appoint big people — Malcolm Rifkind, Kenneth Clarke, William Hague — to the big jobs, if they will take them. But if I were a modernising Tory, I would be alarmed by the rush of success. For the danger is that if Cameron sinks, the modernisers will be sunk with him. We tried that, the party will think, and it didn’t work. Let’s go back to talking about immigration and getting out of Europe.
Over the next few weeks Cameron has to make his party understand quite what level of change and commitment from them will be required for his programme to work (and he could explain it to the rest of us too). For tempting though it is to think that Cameron has already changed the political landscape for ever, he hasn’t. He has made one good speech, and he has looked good, and he may have made the Tory party confront some of its more antiquated beliefs. Not a bad start, but hopes are riding too high.
A member of Cameron’s campaign team compares the contest thus far, the process of trying to pick off votes, to a game of Dungeons and Dragons: You’ve injured the Demon Spider; now you must see if you can extract enough poison from its poison sacs, without hurting yourself, to take you through to the next round where you will need the poison to ward off the creatures of the Underdark.
Cameron yesterday won the support of 56 Tory MPs; that’s a little over a quarter of the parliamentary party. The Undead — Apparitions, Banshees and Chimeras — are all around him. There will be monsters and leeches and worms. Who would be Harry Cameron facing his demons today?
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