IF YOU WANT to understand why British politics has got more interesting since David Cameron’s election as Tory leader, you only have to read Norman Tebbit’s recent cry of pain in The Sunday Telegraph. What, asked the High Priest of Thatcherism, is behind all the “non-stop political pyrotechnics”? Is all this disowning of past policies a shift to “New Labour Lite”? Or — heaven forbid — could Cameron be “the party ‘s Chairman Mao or Pol Pot, intent on purging even the memory and name of Thatcherism . . .”
You can see why Lord Tebbit is concerned. Almost daily another Tory touchstone is apparently ditched. One week Tories are attacking extra spending on the health service, the next Mr Cameron proclaims his lifelong support for the NHS. More grammar schools? Er, no longer our policy.
Lord Tebbit is right: this is an attempted purge we are witnessing. Because the Cameron team has listened to the focus groups it knows that the Tory brand is discredited in the public mind, redolent of failure, division and 1980s individualism. So what we are seeing is a classic piece of makeover politics — an attempt to reposition the Tory brand by repudiating all associations with its own past.
Hence a Sunday newspaper tells us that Mr Cameron is no longer a Thatcherite; yesterday’s speech claims he now cares about poverty; he does interviews with Radio 1 as well as the Telegraph. And while Conservative elder statesmen are asked to lead policy commissions, they aren’t allowed near a TV camera.
You have to admit, he’s done the PR pretty well. All those years in corporate media relations weren’t wasted. Yet this does not explain why both the media and people like me are looking forward with relish to the months ahead. Because if there is one thing I have learnt about the relationship between politics and the media, it is this: for all the obsession with celebrity and headlines, politicians in our country are judged by exacting standards. Are vague statements of intent backed up by policies? Will they work? Are they based on a coherent philosophy? That is as much how Sun editorials judge politicians as those of The Times do.
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And once the novelty wears off, and the rebranding stunts become formulaic, the real debate will begin — about Britain’s future and the kind of country we want to live in. I fear Mr Cameron will find that image-making and rebranding does not take him far.
It took Tony Blair and Gordon Brown a full decade to persuade the public to take the risk of electing Labour. We tried rebranding, ditching old policies and running better TV ads in 1987 and 1992. And still the public did not trust us. When we finally won in 1997, it was not only because the Tories were discredited. Voters were also persuaded our policies were right: a national minimum wage; a windfall tax on the privatised utilities to cut youth unemployment; abolition of the assisted places scheme.
Mr Cameron’s task is to persuade voters that he is a risk worth taking. He needs a credible vision on the economy, public services and the environment and detailed policies to back it up. My prediction is that he is going to find building credibility with the public much harder then he realises.
Hard, because he won’t find it easy to airbrush from the collective memory his own party’s 18-year track record in government. Harder still, as Lord Tebbit points out, because Mr Cameron was the main author of the 2005 manifesto on which his party fought and lost comprehensively. It was Mr Cameron and his colleagues who proposed abolishing the New Deal, wholesale public spending cuts and vouchers in education and health. These are his instincts set out in manifesto form.
This is Mr Cameron’s hardest challenge: he is a Conservative — with or without a tie — and a rather rightward-leaning Tory too. Just look at the policies he set out to win the Tory leadership: a flat tax so the nurse and top executive pay the same rate; withdrawal from the mainstream of European politics; cuts in tax credits; his new fiscal rule that would cut public spending every year below the growth rate of the economy.
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The reality is there are real differences between progressives and Conservative. We all agree that voters are ambitious for themselves and their family and want to lead a good life, to be able to make choices and have a say. We know we need a greater role for voluntary organisations in local services.
But progressives know that addressing individual aspirations and insecurities, like tackling injustice and protecting the environment, requires collective action so all benefit and no one gets left behind. Whereas Tories such as Mr Cameron deny the importance of collective provision in public services or employment policy and would leave people to face economic change alone. They claim there is such a thing as society, but a society of charities and voluntary organisations with a diminishing role for government.
The real test for Mr Cameron will come when the big policy debates are joined. He cannot go on mouthing slogans and disowning past policies without looking superficial and shifty. His task is to succeed where his predecessors failed by persuading the public that Conservative, free-market, small-state policies can credibly address the long-term challenges facing Britain.
Unless, of course, Lord Tebbit’s worst fears are realised and — however unprincipled it may seem — he tries to reject everything he and his party ever stood for. In which case, even the Tories would then be asking: what is the point of David Cameron?
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Ed Balls is Labour MP for Normanton