David Cameron’s attempts to contest ‘progressive’ territory should be welcomed, as well as scrutinised. Political change is embedded and entrenched, as Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher both knew, if you convert political opponents. Having to say it pays reluctant tribute to New Labour. Meaning it would be better still. Labour might be stirred, too, to flesh out what its aspiration to a progressive consensus should mean.
Yet the content of Cameronism remains an enigma. The latest attempt to offer a definition is the almost absurdly ambitious ‘Red Tory’ thesis from Demos’ Philip Blond. But this is far too radical a prospectus for Cameron, still more for a post-Thatcherite party.
Blond critiques social liberalism. Yet this is where the Tories clearly have changed. Acknowledging social liberalism was a sensible conservative adaptation to change once it had happened. Remember early headlines like ‘Cameron: we got it wrong on apartheid’? (An Observer front page story!). Like the laudable efforts to diversify the face of Conservatism, little here demands any sacrifice from the Tory establishment or their electoral coalition.
The Rawls-like commitment to judge all future Tory policy by its impact on the worst off has been less successful. Cutting inheritance tax somehow eluded this test – and was no less popular with the party grassroots for it. Challenges to the entrenched privileges of the middle classes (over grammar schools and ‘sharp elbows’ in school admissions) have been howled down. Yet Red Toryism now offers economic prescriptions – breaking up Tesco; protectionism and localisation; and a major redistribution of assets to the poor (if only they would) – with no Tory constituency at all.
If it isn’t going to happen, why is Cameron so prominently engaging with it? This goes beyond brand decontamination to his emerging governing strategy. Think of Cameron’s Conservatism as the public politics of a Tory court.
Cameron is a pragmatic high Tory: his generation has broadly Thatcherite beliefs, but his dispositional conservatism makes him inclined to wear these relatively lightly. So he will, by design, have a Green Tory in Zac Goldsmith; a Red Tory at Demos; Ken Clarke in his shadow cabinet; as well as tax-cutting and Eurosceptic pressure from the grassroots. All will have his ear, and none his full allegiance.
Paradoxically, a leadership which sees merit in taking no firm view about the ideological direction of the party cannot take a laissez-faire view about the internal debate. That is the lesson of the slow death of John Major.
A Tory court politics is only possible if there are competing views in the party. But Thatcherism left the party mainly thinking one thing – that less state equals more freedom – while the Eurosceptics have organized effectively in constituency selections. Cameron is sponsoring alternative views because they would barely exist without his patronage. It does not mean he agrees with them.
To what end? Cameron’s narrative of ‘conservative means to progressive ends’ offers no coherent account yet of government’s role. It is by always carefully conflating questions of ends and means – the issue of what the state should provide and what the state should guarantee – that Cameron can speak warmly to Guardianistas and Hayekians alike: ‘there is such a thing as society, it is just not the same as the state’ is more or less what Thatcher was trying to say. But the potentially radical right rhetoric of ‘state failure’ is combined with campaigns for more maternity services and post offices whenever public provision is popular.
Don’t complain about the contradictions. This Tory pluralism will elude definition by embracing them. Toryism is not doctrinaire. It is the pragmatic art of governance. The point of Cameron’s Tory court politics is to renew the party’s traditional relationship with power.