Shortly after becoming leader of the Tory party, Margaret Thatcher produced a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty during a Commons debate and declared: ‘This is what I believe.’ If press reports are to be believed, David Cameron is more likely to produce a copy of Philip Gould’s account of the genesis of the New Labour project, The Unfinished Revolution, than a tract by the guru of neoliberal economics.
Gould’s book, once principally required reading for aspiring young Labour apparatchiks has, indeed, found a new audience. Oliver Letwin, a member of Cameron’s inner-circle and heading up a comprehensive review of Tory party policy, was the first senior Tory to admit to reading a copy. George Osborne, Gordon Brown to Cameron’s Tony Blair in journalistic shorthand, has a copy of Gould’s book on prominent display in his Commons’ office.
It’s an article of faith in the Westminster village that Cameron is keen to learn the lessons of how Blair transformed the Labour party in the mid-1990s, thus laying the groundwork for the party’s subsequent hat-trick of election victories. But just how similar are the circumstances between 1994 and 2005 and how likely is it that Cameron will be able, if he so wishes, to pull off a similar political tour de force?
There is certainly a superficial likeness. Like Labour in the mid-1990s, the Tories have lost a series of elections, pointing to deep-rooted problems which the swing of the electoral pendulum alone is unlikely to remedy.
But the Guardian’s political correspondent, Patrick Wintour, urges caution in making too much of the parallels. The 2005 general election, he suggests, was not the equivalent of 1992: ‘In 1992 Labour should arguably have defeated the Tories. Furthermore, within a year of so of that election, post-ERM, it was obvious that the Tories were a spent force, losing their ace of economic efficiency.’ Thus, by the time Blair became leader in 1994, Labour was ahead in the polls and had scored two impressive victories in the local and European elections of that year.
The 2005 election, by contrast, was one that Labour was always going to win. As Cameron became leader, the Tories continued to trail Labour in the polls. And, by the time of the next election, claims Wintour, Labour need not necessarily have lost its reputation for economic competence, while a new leader may well have been able to set the ‘renewal in office’ tone that Tony Blair has so far been unable to pull off.
The challenge confronting the Tories today also differs from that which Labour faced in the mid-1990s. As The Economist has suggested, while Labour needed to demonstrate it was competent, the Conservatives need to show they are decent. In some ways, the Tory problem is a greater one. As Tory chairman Francis Maude has admitted, the party’s image is so bad that even policies which are supposedly popular with the electorate lose much of their support as soon as they are identified as Conservative ones. By the mid-1990s, the Labour ‘brand’ was nowhere near as toxic.
Blair’s inheritance on becoming Labour leader was stronger than that which greets Cameron in a rather more profound way. The new Tory leader, argues former No10 special adviser Patrick Diamond, inherits no ‘reformist mantle’ from his predecessors. Blair’s modernising zeal, he suggests, was matched by that of Neil Kinnock and John Smith: ‘Since the mid-1980s, they had already seen off Militant and Scargill, and introduced One Member, One Vote. The momentum for change and renewal was well underway by 1994.’
Cameron suffers, suggests Wintour, from the lack of a ‘John the Baptist’ figure which Blair had in the form of Neil Kinnock: ‘It was clear within four years of the 1983 Foot-defeat where the intellectual centre of gravity was inside Labour, and that the figures around Neil Kinnock were going to triumph at conference, on the National Executive Committee and in the parliamentary party.’ Cameron’s Tory party, however, still looks divided and the modernisation project, believes Wintour, is ‘very thinly supported, understood or articulated’. The Tories’ problem, claims Paul Richards, who was heavily involved in the new Clause IV campaign, is that many believe that choosing the right leader alone is sufficient for them to win the next election. ‘What we learnt is that modernisation is not about the faces at the top, but the fundamental values and policies and their connection to the public,’ he argues.
By 1994, both Blair and Brown had established clear profiles as modernisers within the party and to the wider public. Blair had transformed Labour’s approach to industrial relations and, at the time of Smith’s death, was busily confronting the party’s ‘soft on crime’ image. Brown, meanwhile, was working to erase Labour’s perceived attachment to ‘tax and spend’, having already done much to build business confidence in the party.
Cameron’s credentials as a moderniser are, however, much weaker. It’s true that, during the course of the leadership contest, he bluntly warned the Tories that they needed a radical change of direction. ‘More of the same’, he argued, would amount to ‘sleep walking to another defeat’. Rhetorically, at least, Cameron has also tentatively broken with some of the Thatcherite mantras. ‘I believe there is such a thing as society,’ he suggests, ‘I just think it’s different from the state.’ Cameron is affecting a distinctly un-Thatcherite concern for the plight of the urban poor. Education and the environment, again not traditionally strong Tory suits, have also featured prominently in his speeches.
But, for the most part, Cameron did not use the leadership campaign, as some of his advisers like Letwin urged, to demonstrate how radically he will attempt to change the Tories. Moreover, unlike Blair, the Tory leader has also demonstrated a tendency, when under pressure, to appease some of his party’s unreconstructed elements. Eurosceptics were wooed with a pledge to pull Tory MEPs out of the European People’s party grouping, while traditionalists were enticed with a promise to bias the tax system in favour of marriage (a stance criticised by some modernisers, like Tim Yeo).
While Cameron’s campaign has not been as policy-lite as some of its critics suggest, two of his big ideas – encouraging the growth of social enterprises to tackle urban poverty and a national service scheme – lack the kind of clearly defined and demonstrable break with traditional Conservative thinking with which the Tory leader could signal a new direction to sceptical voters.
The launch of the findings of the Tory tax commission early in the New Year may not help much either in this regard. ‘For thirty years,’ claims Diamond, ‘the right’s big idea has been “less state”. Their flirtation with the flat tax shows this is where the Conservatives’ true beliefs lie.’ The issue also points to a wider problem for Cameron. The Tory party remains fundamentally divided between those who want to shrink the size of government and those who believe the state matters. ‘It is an unbridgeable divide,’ suggests Diamond.
For Labour, this may be too optimistic an assessment and the next few months could be critical. Will Cameron, like Blair in 1994, succeed in maintaining the momentum he has gained coming out of the leadership contest, and use it to imprint an indelible modernising image in the electorate’s mind? The 1994 precedent is a tough one to follow. As Gould recalls, the ten months after Blair became Labour leader represented a time of ‘electric shock therapy’ for the party, culminating in the adoption of the new Clause IV. But what would a Tory Clause IV moment be? ‘Accept the Blair legacy,’ suggests Wintour. It certainly has a neat symmetry.