For the past six months, Labour has visibly struggled as it attempts to define the new leader of the Conservative party. David Cameron has hardly offered a helping hand, describing himself in quick succession as ‘a liberal Conservative’, ‘Blair’s true heir’ and ‘Conservative to the core’.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the best-known picture Labour has offered the voters so far of Cameron – ‘Dave the Chameleon’ – came in the form of a somewhat slippery character, best known for its ability to elude pursuers.
Since the Conservatives’ victory in the local elections last month, the unenviable task of giving the public Labour’s account of the Tory leader has fallen to the party’s new chair, Hazel Blears. ‘It is one of my prime responsibilities and tasks,’ she says, ‘to have a very clear analysis not just about Cameron, but also about the Tory party: who they are, what they stand for – not just their record, but also what they will do.’
Blears is dismissive of the charge that Labour erred by giving Cameron the space early on to define himself. ‘You don’t do this immediately within a week of someone being elected as the new leader of the party; you don’t put them in a box and say “this is how we are going to campaign for the next four years”.’
She recognises, however, that ‘a resurgent Tory party’ now poses a greater threat to Labour than at any time since the early 1990s: ‘Until relatively recently I don’t think people were interested in the Tories. People were embarrassed to admit to being Tories. That position has changed.’ The local elections revealed that ‘where they are traditionally strong, the Tories are now coming back quite hard. The vote that stayed at home is now prepared to actually come out.’
Blears now thinks it is time to take the gloves off. ‘I think we are beginning to see emerging some difficulties with some of his policy choices. If you look at the stuff on the European People’s party [which Cameron pledged during the leadership campaign to pull Tory Euro MPs out of] now he can’t find a home for them that is more respectable than the fascists. The Czechs don’t want to know, the Poles don’t want to know, he is going to be homeless in Europe. And I think that is a pretty clear error of judgement and inexperience. He has got no foreign policy experience, and he doesn’t know where to go with it. So it is more important than it looks. It is quite a narrow issue but I think it is quite indicative.’
The Tory leader, charges Labour’s chair, is also beginning to betray signs of ‘really poor strategic judgment’ in other areas too. On issues surrounding crime and security, ranging from some of the anti-terrorism measures to the serious organised crime bill and ID cards, the Conservatives are now ‘not sure where they are and whether to align themselves with the civil liberties lobby’. The government’s proposals, by contrast, are ‘where the public are’. Blears also expects Cameron to come under ‘huge pressure from the environmental lobby, saying “this is your big test”,’ on the question of renewing some of the country’s nuclear power stations.
Blears accepts, however, that Labour has to ‘do something more than just criticise him as a PR man’, and she admits that he has been doing ‘some very clever positioning, a replay of our book from 1997’. The result is that the Tories are ‘managing to dispel some of that reputation that they had’.
She is, though, not willing to accept that Cameron’s modernisation can be compared to Tony Blair’s in the mid-1990s. ‘I don’t think he has been through anything like the intellectual analysis of their principles, their values and what they stand for’. Blears is moreover unimpressed with the statement of aims and values Cameron published at the beginning of the year: ‘motherhood and apple pie, anybody could have written it; so it’s not quite his Clause IV moment.’
So what will Labour’s future line of attack be? ‘I think what the public are interested in, when it comes to making the big decisions, is: is this the man you want to be prime minister? Can you trust him if he says one thing and does another, if he says one thing and changes his mind? That then starts to make people think: if you can’t trust him on his policy issues, can you trust him with your mortgage, can you trust him with your job, can you trust him with the interest rates, when [Labour’s] strength is being absolutely solid on the economy? And then you have got the bit that says: if you can’t quite trust him, do I take a risk? And you don’t take a risk on your mortgage and your job and your kids future, do you?’ Blears concludes: ‘I think there is an analysis there that we will build up, that we will work hard on him. But it is not personal, Mr Cameron.’
But the Tory resurgence has not occurred in a vacuum, and Labour’s chair recognises that the party has scored a number of own goals: ‘We have had a number of events,’ she suggests, ‘which, if you wanted to paint a difficult picture for us, you couldn’t have made up.’ The result is that the voters who returned Labour to power a year ago are ‘incredibly impatient when people talk about their own careers and their own position.’ Nonetheless, Blears does not believe that ‘there is a great tidal wave sweeping the country that says we want to get rid of a Labour government.’
The party chair dismisses, however, any notion that Labour’s third term thus far has been somewhat ‘lacklustre’. ‘I think it has been more exciting than that. I think a few months of calm and boring politics would be a great bonus at the moment.’ She continues: ‘I think our third term is the time when you really start to make the things you have done on a small scale actually spread to the whole of the country and then you start to see the changes.’
She cites the expansion of the country’s 500 Sure Start centres to a national network of 3,500 children’s centres, and the drive to build more affordable housing. Blears is also keen to trumpet the recent announcement on pensions: the restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, the massive expansion in the number of women who will be entitled to a full pension, and the creation of pensions for carers.
As she lists the government’s achievements – both nationally and on the ground in her Salford constituency – we note that Blears is famed for her enthusiasm. ‘The word “enthusiasm” is used in a pejorative sense,’ she counters. ‘The reason I am enthusiastic is not because I am some kind of jolly cheerleader. It is because I think there is a good solid foundation to be proud of, but we are not satisfied … Politics is such a cynical business that unless you are cynical somehow, you haven’t got a deep enough analysis. I think that is quite corrosive.’ Corrosive it maybe. But what does Labour have most to fear? A cynical public? Or one beginning to discover its enthusiasm for a new Tory leader?