DAVID CAMERON has made an impressive start in the leadership contest. His campaign launch on Thursday combined presentation with passion. It needed to. Before Thursday the news media and perhaps some of his own supporters in the Conservative Party were close to writing him off. This has changed.
Why? The X-factor, I think. The Tories have become hugely sensitive to appearance without quite knowing what to do about it, and can see that there is something appealing about Mr Cameron. It’s an indefinable quality and one you may think insubstantial, but I am sure voters will like the look and sound of him. He comes across well and this matters tremendously in a Tory leader. It is why, were I still a Conservative MP, I should be among his supporters.
But not an uncritical supporter. I should be begging him and Kenneth Clarke to form a team. And one of the conditions I should implore Mr Clarke to attach to his involvement in any such enterprise would be an absolute prohibition on any further use of the word “change”. Only Mr Clarke has the philosophical confidence to put a stop to the ceaseless Tory wittering about the buzz-concept of the hour.
“Change to win. Change to win and we will win!” Mr Cameron cried at his launch. He seems unable to open his mouth without the word popping out. David Davis is just as bad. “I am the candidate most capable of shaping an agenda for change,” he declared at his own launch on Thursday. Meanwhile, down in Brighton, Tony Blair has been parroting the same platitudes: “That’s what we’ve been in new Labour: the change-makers!”
It’s getting stale, all this stuff about change. I am not the first to remark that those who see patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel may be overlooking the boundless possibilities of the word “change”. Ritual obeisance before the altar of reform is now part of the sacrament of British politics, and nowhere is this truer than in the party whose very name ought to offer its supporters a clue as to what they are supposed to be here for.
One more bleat that “the Conservative Party has got to change” and I shall scream. Among these folk the call for renewal is now positively routine. As the party heads towards Blackpool for the latest in almost a decade of annual conferences, every one of which has been billed beforehand as a “turning point”, a “moment of truth” and a “last chance” for a “new beginning”, the Tories should be challenged to confront the one thing about themselves that really is mouldy: their constant, ritualised moaning about the need to change. Imagine: a Tory leader who didn’t babble about change. Now that really would be a change.
To hell with change: let’s hear it for continuity. To hell with turning points: let’s hear it for the old, hard road. To hell with “moments” of truth: let’s hear it for the old truths you knew already. To hell with tipping points, deadlines, starting-guns, relaunches, rebrandings, reappraisal, repentance, rebirth, reform, revelation, redemption and the whole damn lexicon of renewal. Let’s hear it for holding our nerve, holding to the things we know, and holding on. Let’s hear it for sticking to the facts. Let’s hear it for sticking to our guns. And — yes — let’s hear it for one more heave.
I do not accept the near-obligatory view that the first duty of the Conservative Party, or any party, must be to “change with the times”. That should depend on whether a party judges the drift of events and ideas to be good for the people it hopes to lead. On occasions it may be rather important not to reflect the popular mood or change with the times. The times may be wrong about something. We want our politicians to tell us if they think so.
I don’t hold with media commentary which parrots the opinion that the Tories “just don’t get it” about modern Britain’s preference for improved public services, and Britain’s contentment at the level of taxation needed to pay for these. If Tory MPs think public expectations are unrealistically high, or taxes damaging, it is not deaf, complacent or smug to stick to that view and warn us.
My complaint about the Conservative Party is that if this is what it thinks, it should stop muttering into its sleeve and shout it out. The party’s treatment of Howard Flight said a lot about a failure of ideological self- confidence.
Worthwhile people do not go into politics simply in order to take their colour from the colour of their times, but also to lend to their times the colour of their own beliefs, ideas and — I emphasise the word — calculations. They go into politics not just to be shown, but to show. Yet in the modern fog of marketing phraseology about “connecting with”, “listening to”, “reaching out to”, being “relevant” to and “reflecting” 21st-century Britain, the impression comes across (I notice it in my colleague Tim Hames’s writing) that the first duty of a realistic Tory party would be, like the managers of a supermarket chain, to find out what its target market wants and shape its policies, image and appeal accordingly. Tim notes that new Labour has been rather successful at selling itself and advises Tories to embrace a similar but enhanced “look” and product range.
This betrays a stunted understanding not only of politics, but of commerce too. Great business leaders anticipate and lead — even create — the market; they do not just follow and supply it. There was no obvious demand for Model T Fords or the Body Shop before Henry Ford or Anita Roddick existed. There was no great demand in the 1930s for a war with Germany. I suppose a Hames of his day could have advised Churchill to get real, reach out and connect to the modern Britain he was living in.
If you think your country has taken a false turn, missed an opportunity or is drifting unawares — if you think the political consensus of your day, however popular, is wrong — then not only do you have a responsibility to sound a warning, but you will understand the political advantage of doing so, even if you are booed at first. Years ago this newspaper said that Mr Clarke had blundered in opposing the Iraq war, because it was popular within and outside his party. He saw otherwise.
Of course sensible leaders do not try to lead where the led will never follow. They make what accommodations they can with the image the voters want to see. They do try to “modernise”, as Mr Cameron urges. He is right to want to shape a party which likes the century it inhabits and the country it hopes to govern. He is evidently at ease in it himself, which is a flying start. But he should not forget that good and ultimately effective politicians may sometimes take issue with their epoch.
It is nonsense to chorus, as smart commentators do, that new Labour has left the Tories with no ideological ground to fight on. Against the background of a public sector swelled by 900,000 (while a prime minister prattles of a “strategic” rather than a big State), rocketing public spending — “investment” as Gordon Brown calls it — is right at the centre of new Labour’s boast: territory it cannot abandon except in disgrace. Taxes are going to have to rise — territory the Tories know to be their natural battleground. The sky may soon be dark with Gordon Brown’s and Tony Blair’s chickens coming home to roost and for the Conservative Party there is everything to fight for over the next few years.
But that fight must begin from an understanding that the test of an opposition and its leader is not how far they can follow the spirit of their age, but how far they can lead it. Or what could be the point of a career in politics? One might as well sell knickers.
