Before New Labour’s 1997 landslide, Tony Blair expressed the hope that the new millennium would mark the start of a ‘progressive century’. This meant balancing economic competence with social justice and maintaining a broad electoral coalition. It also implied fostering a close relationship with the Liberal Democrats and creating an electoral system that better represented votes cast for Westminster and entrenched a Lib-Lab ‘progressive alliance’ with a permanent anti-Conservative majority. For a time, Blair’s ambition seemed reasonable. Now, however, as Gordon Brown and cabinet colleagues glumly ponder the possibility of electoral meltdown, a ‘progressive century’ seems somewhat unlikely, to say the least. The Conservatives are back.
While a general election need not be held until May 2010, things seem pretty well set for a Conservative majority of some sort when the prime minister finally decides to face the music. That, at least, has been the general assumption since Brown infamously dithered over whether to hold an election in the autumn of 2007. Matters are, however, not quite so cut and dried. In December 2008 the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham brought together academics, journalists and politicians of the calibre of Ken Clarke and David Willetts to look behind the headlines and soberly discuss the prospects and character of David Cameron’s party. The results are published in the 2009 spring edition of Political Quarterly; and the overall conclusion is that the Conservatives still have a mountain to climb.
As John Curtice points out in his article, if the LibDems perform as well as they did in the 2005 general then – just to get an overall Commons majority of two – the Conservatives need an 11-point lead over Labour in the popular vote. Current polls suggest that under Nick Clegg the LibDems will do less well; yet, even if Clegg’s vote halved, Cameron would still need to beat Labour by seven points to get a bare majority. No wonder Brown is relatively nice to Clegg during prime minister’s questions. Of course the polls have lately often put the Conservatives 20 points ahead of Labour – and so point to a 100-seat majority. However, on the basis of past experience that gap should narrow the closer to an election we get.
Despite recent boundary changes there are, moreover, still too many urban and northern seats compared to their southern and suburban equivalents. This puts the Conservatives at something of a disadvantage. Cameron recently called for a smaller House of Commons. He claimed this would make politics cheaper; it would also take seats from Labour and give them to the Conservatives by abolishing under-populated seats in Scotland and the north. He is nonetheless stuck with the present system for now.
The party faces other problems. Its recovery has hardly started in Scotland while the north of England, as Nick Randall points out, also remains resistant to Cameron’s charms despite his attempt to look more sympathetic than previous leaders. If the former has articulated its disenchantment with Labour by largely voting SNP, the latter more often than not turns to the LibDems (or sometimes the BNP). Middle-class seats that in the 1980s returned Conservatives, like Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Withington, are set to remain in LibDem hands.
There is also little evidence that the Conservatives will perform dispro-portionately better in marginal seats. In recent general elections Labour has done much better in such constituencies than was merited by its national share of the vote through pouring in funds and activists. The Conservatives took their time to learn the lesson. Now, however, they benefit from the largesse of Lord Ashcroft, the party’s deputy chairman.
This, Charles Pattie and Ron Johnson establish, means that local parties – especially those in marginal seats – are better funded than ever. Brown supposedly backed off from holding an election in 2007 for fear that this ‘Ashcroft money’ had imperiled 50 or so Labour marginals. Basing their work on a close examination of returns made to the Electoral Commission, Pattie and Johnson suggest that despite this the Conservatives are not as well-placed as some Labour MPs fear. Although financially better off than in 2005, in terms of members even local parties in key marginals have continued to decline. There has been no Cameron bounce here. That raises the question: what good is the extra money if there are not the activists to spend it? Of course, Labour’s position in the constituencies is now probably even worse – the disenchantment that set in during Blair’s last years has seen membership evaporate.
Of course such matters would be mere details if Cameron had not reconnected his party with the kinds of voters that make or break governments, as Margaret Thatcher and Blair had once done. For Cameron has succeeded in ‘decontaminating the brand’, distancing Conservatives from the perception that theirs was the ‘nasty party’, of old-fashioned prejudice and intolerance. As Tim Bale concludes, the difference between Cameron and his immediate predecessors was that he has ruthlessly kept to the strategy of targeting middle England. Much of this was done by images, hints and symbols rather than by changing policies. Cameron’s green credentials, for example, remain vague while the party has resolutely refused to say anything serious about devolution and democratic reform.
Labour’s own considerable troubles have helped Cameron get away with this studied elusiveness while regular poll leads mean internal party critics are silenced. Previously fatal issues like Europe will remain in the background while Cameron looks set to be the first Conservative prime minister since John Major. The ghost of Norman Tebbit no longer keeps Conservative strategists awake at night like it did before 2001 and 2005.
A Conservative victory – of whatever scale – is hardly in the bag. However, beyond a dramatic improvement in the country’s economic fortunes, it is hard to see Labour retaining office. That opportunity probably passed during Brown’s first 100 days when promises of a ‘new politics’, of substance over style, of a ‘government of all the talents’, including a LibDem or two, died as soon as they passed from the lips. In the wake of the recession and the furore over MPs’ expenses the public have stopped listening. Their minds have been made up, in the same way they had been in 1997 when Conservatives could point to a growing economy but were still kicked out of office. Reviving the progressive alliance at this late stage would not work – its chances fatally diminished when the Labour cabinet rejected the 1998 Jenkins commission’s proposals for electoral reform and were buried during the Iraq war. In fact, under Nick Clegg the LibDems have more in common with Cameron’s Conservatives than Brown’s Labour party.
Even so, the Conservatives could still enjoy a healthy lead over Labour at the next election and still fail to win a Commons majority. Brown might try to stagger on in such circumstances, although the more likely outcome would see Cameron put into office through an arrangement with the LibDems. A Conservative government with a slim but workable majority nonetheless remains the likeliest outcome. At that point Cameron’s studied vagueness in opposition might come home to roost, especially if his majority was largely based on southern English seats. Legitimacy might be a problem.
Moreover, while any post-election Conservative parliamentary party will include more women, as Philip Cowley points out, it will also be an extremely inexperienced group. That will probably give the leadership some early advantages as newer MPs tend to be more tractable; although it also means that many junior ministers will have little knowledge of Commons procedure, let alone how to handle civil servants. Furthermore, Cameron will be the first Conservative prime minister to face a House of Lords in which the party does not have an inbuilt majority. Should the Conservatives win the next election, then, they may face problems that a Labour leadership that has learnt the right lessons from defeat might be able to exploit. In politics there is always hope.