The Progressive

Cameron is a manager not a leader

In politics if you are not on the attack then you are on the defence, on the front foot or the back foot. For this reason courage is the friend of political leaders and caution, their enemy.

What Gordon Brown has proved in recent weeks is that when a governing party has confidence and self-belief it is far more willing (and able) to offer a lead and to take the tough decisions. What Brown is fast learning is that the British people are often happy and willing to forgive the occasional error and poor decision but they rarely forgive the leader who simply refuses to take a decision because it is too tough. The Tory labels of ‘bottler’ and ‘ditherer’ hurt Brown and for most of the past twelve months the media has been looking for (and occasionally gifted) opportunities to portray the former Iron Chancellor as a bumbling buffoon. The credit crunch has changed all that – or to be more precise, the Prime Minister’s handling of the global economic crisis has helped to restore his reputation for competence and decisiveness.

In contrast David Cameron’s handling of recent events has exposed him to criticism that he is a shallow, one dimensional leader who talks a good game but fails to deliver the big ideas when needed. Cameron has not had a good economic ‘war’ for several reasons. Firstly he has suffered from the perception that both he his party are too closely associated with the City fat cats whose greed triggered this financial meltdown. Secondly, since taking up their present posts neither he nor his shadow Chancellor has ever taken the opportunity to speak out against the dangers of a poorly regulated City. Thirdly, Cameron has not offered a clear policy alternative in terms of what a Tory administration would have done about the crisis had they been in office.

Perhaps now we will see the media turn its attention to exactly how

Britain would be different if the Tories were to form the next government. Does Mr Cameron have the courage necessary to lead, to take the tough decisions? I doubt it. He says he wants tax cuts and more spending but with the same money. He says he wants to sort out all illegal immigration, but he opposes identity cards, the one thing essential to do it. He says he against academic selection one day but then backs plans to expand it the next.

Has the Tory party changed? Most of Mr Cameron's reforms have been primarily cosmetic (a new HQ, a new party logo) and short-lived (the party's "A" list of candidates). Today’s Conservative front bench is made up of the "right kind of people", Cameron’s people - privately educated and from a background of immense wealth and privilege. Under Cameron, the Tories still believe that the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their political, their economic, and their social views. The events of recent weeks have prompted me to reflect on the words of the former Tory (now Labour) MP Quentin Davies. In his letter to Cameron outlining his reasons for leaving the Conservative party and join Labour, he wrote: "Under your leadership the Conservative party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda." As the rightwing press begins to turn on him, how long will it be before Cameron is forced to retreat towards having to peddle past Tory agendas? How long before he is told that he needs to embrace more "traditional" core Tory issues such as Europe, crime and the family? How long before a newly elected Tory leader who started out saying his aim is to recapture the centre ground of British politics, is yet again forced (by his own reactionary right wing) to move to the right in an attempt to hang on to the Tory core vote?

Cameron is no Obama but he is like...

Iain Dale really is getting carried away with himself when he compares Cameron with Barack Obama. Why? Unlike Cameron, Barack Obama takes a ‘fair-minded’ approach to politics; he understands that truth and certainty are not the same thing. Obama (who regularly talks to halls and gyms packed with supporters who have queued hours to hear him speak - I doubt Cameron will ever have such an impact) believes in the politics of the common good.

Common good politics is the politics of empowerment; it is the politics that espouses cooperation not competition, the hand up and not just the hand out. Cameron's approach to politics is very different. Cameron's modern Tory party will act unilaterally when it can (for example on Europe) and cooperate when it has to (for example on trade or climate change). Under Cameron the Tories still believe that the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their political, their economic, and their social views.

Unlike Obama, Cameron subscribes to the idea that social responsibility means the state doing less. Cameron's Tories, instinctively, want to shrink the state, they want fewer civil servants and a revival of old fashioned ‘business philanthropy’ and charity-sector work to plug any future gaps in state provision.

Granted both men are ideologues? Cameron an ideologue? Yes – and the worst kind of ideologue, an ideologue with no convictions. Cameron pretends to know all the answers and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, which is why he so often resorts to vague and general assertions and personal attacks on his political opponents. Obama relishes debate and ideas; he seeks to create policy based on sound evidence and a clear sense of justice and moral conviction. David Cameron relishes sound bites, image and tomorrow’s headlines; he has a clear sense of what will look good and almost no apparent political convictions.

We were first told that Cameron was the 'heir to Blair' and more recently he has been portrayed as a loyal Thatcerite. Now he is the Tory party's anwer to Barck Obama. The truth is that Michael Portillo has it about right when he suggests that Cameron will need at least two elections before he can hope to restore the Tory party's fortunes at the polls.

Cameron is no Obama, Cameron is the Tories' Neil Kinnock.

Why it's not a lurch to the right

It's not often that there's a meeting of minds between Andrew Rawnsley and Melanie Phillips. David Cameron's apparent inability to make up his mind about his post-Blair direction of travel, however, seems to have provoked just that.

Yesterday, Rawnsley reported the Tory leader's inner circle denying that their boss was engaged in a 'lurch to the right' after three weeks in which Cameron has desperately attempted to ward off a savaging by his rightwing critics by tossing them red meat on tax cuts, crime and immigration. 'If it is not a lurch to the right,' sniffed Rawnsley, 'it's a lurch all over the place'.

And today, Phillips follows up with a similar charge. 'The greatest harm,' she warns, 'comes not, as [Cameron's] critics think, from the word "right" but from the word "lurch".' She goes on:

This is because, whatever views he may have, it is even more important for a potential Prime Minister to be seen to have the virtue of consistency. If you don't know where you are with him, you can't trust him; and trust is ultimately what guides people to cast their vote. Opportunism is fatal to that trust. And the Tories' abrupt change of direction seems to be dictated by just such opportunism.

But both Rawnsley and Phillips seems to misread the nature of the Cameron project. As Bruce Anderson argues in today's Independent, the Tory modernisers' outlook has long rested on the view that it was the Conservative brand, not the party's policies, which lay at the heart of their electoral misfortunes over the past decade or so. In polls and focus groups prior to the 2005 general election traditional Tory themes - on crime, Europe, immigration and tax - were popular with voters; support for them plummeted, however, once their association with the Conservatives was revealed. The solution: rebrand the Tory party as inclusive and modern and ditch the 'nasty party' image of the Hague-IDS-Howard years.

As Anderson bluntly puts it, the Cameroons' aim 'was to lead the voters to reassess Toryism, not to sunder their party from the Tory tradition'. Cameron, he continues, is a 'small-c Conservative': 'a Kissingerian realist' on foreign policy and a man who 'happily worked for Michael Howard' at the Home Office and 'has never suggested that a single criminal should serve a single day less in custody for a single crime'.

And let's not forget the only three concrete pledges Cameron made during his campaign for the Tory leadership: to introduce tax breaks for marriage, withdraw the Conservatives from the supposedly federalist European People's party in the European Parliament, and ensure a more diverse mix of parliamentary candidates - in other words, rightwing policies presented by new faces.

Cameron may well have chosen the wrong path to No.10, but let's not pretend he's been panicked by the 'Brown bounce' into deviating from it.

Marginal impact

In today’s Guardian, New Statesman editor John Kampfner seems to answer ‘no’ to the question his magazine posed on its front cover a couple of weeks ago: is it already game over in the Brown v Cameron battle?

Kampfner points out that while the Tories have of late appeard to be having a rough ride (by-election failures, poor opinion poll ratings etc.), they have been quietly plugging away behind the scenes, pouring money into key marginals that will decide the outcome of the next election.

‘Elections are won and lost by a democratically unrepresentative number of floating voters in a small number of constituencies,’ says Kampfner. ‘It would not take a large swing for many of these seats to change hands.’

Brown might be ‘gladdening Labour hearts for the first time in a long time’ but what will happen when playing to the party faithful looks like it might risk alienating the privileged (predominantly middle class) minority who live in swing seats?

As Alan Johnson argued at May’s Progress/Fabian Society deputy leadership hustings, if Labour were to adopt a policy of banning of grammar schools it would be greeted with applause by many party members. The downside would be droves of voters in Gloucester and Slough taking their votes to Cameron. ‘If we want to carry out our policies we have to be in power and we have to be aware in deciding our policies what that will do for our chances of being elected to government,’ said Johnson. ‘Real politik’.

Perhaps electoral reform wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Tory defections - who will be next?

In his resignation letter to David Cameron, Quentin Davies the now Labour MP for Grantham and Stamford, states:

'Under your (David Cameron) leadership the Conservative party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.'

He is, of course, absolutely correct, but who will be next?

Nominations are open!

Cameron shows he’s in touch at PMQ’s… by referencing Demosthenes

Now it may be because I didn’t receive a classical education, but did anyone else have to Google Demosthenes after watching PMQ’s today? According to the beloved Wiki, Demosthenes was a brilliant Greek orator and intellectual in Ancient Athens. In case you had better things to do in your working day, Cameron quipped to Blair in the weekly head-to-head:

"I know you don't want to talk about the deputy leadership campaign because the contest looks like it could achieve the impossible - which is to make the current deputy prime minister look like a cross between Ernie Bevin and Demosthenes."

You could just see the Cameroons guffawing at their leader’s snide remark, sitting smugly on the green benches, minds drifting back to days of ancient history and classical languages lessons. But the fact is that Cameron’s jibe reflects old snobberies which should have no place in our progressive time, and should remind people where his real loyalties lie. Not with working class people like Prescott was, working his way up through self-education, but with that small elite who can afford to send their children to schools like Eton. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t want our children to grow up knowing about classical greats, but despite all Cameron’s rhetoric about how he doesn’t care about grammars and private schools, his little gag reveals that he’ll use someone’s background if it suits him. Michael Gove was rather more candid about what he thought in a reply to a question on Channel 4 about the number of Tory Etonian frontbenchers: “Well all that tells me is that their parents thought well enough of their children to want to invest money in their education.”

Cameron capturing the centre-ground? Go ask the man on the Clapham omnibus who Demosthenes is, and he’ll give you the answer.

Yorkshire Tories embarrassed by "southern softie" Cameron

Yorkshire Tory candidates for the local election in May are clearly embarrassed by having David Cameron as their leader. On the walls of the offices of Haltemprice and Howden Conservative Association you will find photos of Margaret Thatcher, William Hague and David Davis - strangely there is no photo of the current Tory leader.

According to the Times none of the local Tory campaign literature for the May elections feature David Cameron's name let alone his photo. One local Tory candidate - a Mr Ros Jump - told the Times: “Cameron is seen as a southern softie. I don’t go out of my way to talk about David Cameron. As far as everyone around here is concerned, David Davis is the leader.”

The sham of Cameron the family man

I've written before about the fact that Cameron's support for flexible working was only skin deep. Today's FT confirmed what we'd suspected for a long time. In the end, business is the Tories' Pied Piper, and the same old tune about how new flexible working rules will create a 'regulatory burden' has sent the rat Cameron scurrying away from earlier statements about his commitment to flexible working. Similar arguments were made about the Minimum Wage, so no surprise that Cameron failed to back that as well.

Instead Cameron will rely on that successful fallback of exhorting businesses to be fluffier in their employment practices because evidence shows that those companies with flexible working options have more committed staff and an improved bottom line. While this may indeed be true, relying on business case arguments for corporate social responsibility is a dangerous path to tread. What happens if worker's rights don't improve the bottom line, but are simply best practice to safeguard individuals in the interests of a better society? This is the whole problem with Cameron - he's only talking this talk because it butters up liberal opinion formers, but when the chips are down he doesn't actually believe any of it. If he did, he would be supporting Beverley Hughes' arguments that all workers should have some access to flexibility, rather than just those with young children or other relatives who need care.

Tories are wringing their hands about lack of family stability, poor levels of mental health, the commercialisation of children, etc. but are failing to look at practical ways of ensuring that citizens can balance their work with their caring responsibilities for others as well as themselves. Extending flexible working shouldn't be about bottom lines, it should be about enabling people to create wealth without damaging their ability to have a family, to care for a loved one, or to take a sabbatical to fulfill a dream of seeing the world. So far it's only Labour that has had the vision and power to put this into practice, and it doesn't look like the Tories will be following suit.

Back to the kitchen

The Tories may be desperately trying to rein in their unruly Policy Commissions with promises that any future policies will have to pass “sound money tests”, but they should be just as worried about whether their policies pass ‘sound’ tests full stop.

Despite talking the good talk about flexible working, for example, I’ve just found out that one of the members of the Tories’ Social Justice Policy Commission is Kathy Gyngell, a Thatcher groupy and founder of the ‘let’s go back to the 1950s’ group, Full-Time Mothers. Their website asks visitors insightful questions such as “Are you tired of seeing your family's taxes diverted towards encouraging more childcare and absentee parenting?” According to a document put together by Hazel Blears, Kathy Gyngell has said that "When a child's mother dies, that is a terrible tragedy. But we impose that tragedy on every child when we leave them to go to work". So she’d not have much truck with Cameron’s pledge that: “flexible working and high quality, affordable childcare (should) become the basic entitlement of every working family”. I guess Cameron’s choice of Gyngell to sit on the Commission shows just how deep his commitment to flexible working goes…

Goodbye to the A-list and its ‘sensational six-pack’

David Cameron has relinquished control on the selection of Conservative Parliamentary Candidates. Central Office has finally bowed to calls from local parties, and has given them greater powers of selection. They will no longer have to select a candidate from the priority A-list, and instead can choose from the wider approved list of candidates. Tim Montgomerie, former Chief of Staff to IDS and also of ConservativeHome fame, has called the move “an acknowledgment of defeat by the party”. Now that the local parties have been given greater freedom in their selection process, it remains to be seen if they will still select their candidates from ‘London’s chi-chi set’. 

And in other news, The New Zealand Herald reports that the A-list’s most famous face, Adam Rickitt, has been seeking a return to acting on a Kiwi soap. Now that Central Office has been defeated, has the ‘most sensational six-pack in politics’ now given up hope of finding favour with the grassroots?