The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, by Tim Bale
If a future historian wants to know why either David Cameron lost the 2010 general election, or, more likely, why the Cameron government was such an abject failure, a clue can be found on p21 of Tim Bale’s new book about the Tories. Bale writes: ‘Rather than re-engineering his party, as Blair (and to a lesser extent Kinnock and Smith) did, the Tory leader has only restyled it.’
Cameron has restyled his party. He has given it a new logo, new slogans, new policy aromas. He has shoved shiny new faces to the fore. He has taken his tie off. He has said nice things about the NHS and overseas aid. He has brought Modernity along to the party, introduced her to his stuffy friends, and set their hearts aflutter. Cameron has done to the Conservative party what Sir Norman Foster has done to the Reichstag: planted a contemporary design atop a traditional edifice.
Bale’s book describes the journey the Conservatives have made since the assassination of Margaret Thatcher (can it really be 20 years ago?), through the Major government’s inexorable decline and defeat, into the wilderness with Hague in his baseball cap, the quiet man IDS and anti-immigrant Howard, and recovery under Cameron.
He catalogues the Tories’ propensity to self-harm in forensic detail, a period which dispels the view previously widely held that ‘the Tories will do and say anything to get into power’. Bale shows that the Tories did just about everything they could to avoid the burdens of office. They bled themselves white in Verdun-like battles over the European Union. They stuffed their pockets with cash-for-questions and cheated on their wives. They elected leaders who alienated and repulsed the public. They engaged the kind of dog-whistle politics that might play in Australia, but not in the south of England. And all the while they blamed the voters for not voting Conservative, believing them to be either stupid or hoodwinked by Labour.
The later sections of the book contain the best account so far of the ‘decontamination’ strategy pursued by Cameron after his surprise win in the leadership contest of 2005. Cameron’s whole approach is determined by applying commercial marketing methodology to politics. He sees the Conservative party as a failing brand, and so after 2005 embarks on a PR strategy to rebuild market share. He does his market research to find out what the customers want. And then sets about making changes to bring them back. You can view the rebranding, the repositioning and the airbrushing entirely in the context of a marketing challenge, like selling Skodas or Burberry scarves. Bale writes that Cameron’s moment of triumph at the 2005 Tory party conference was because ‘he understood, possibly because of his commercial PR experience, that his appearance had to be a pitch not a speech’. Cameron’s leadership has been one long pitch.
There is a belief within Tory ranks that this is what Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and Philip Gould did with New Labour after 1994. Over the past five years it has seemed that Cameron’s team have simply read Gould’s Unfinished Revolution and treated it like a blueprint.
But they have failed to understand that New Labour was not a marketing device, but an unearthing of the Labour party’s revisionist roots, a renewal of ancient values. It was a conscious disentangling of policies from ideology, and the application of timeless values to contemporary problems. New Labour could pray in aid socialist thinkers from Tony Crosland to Richard Tawney. Blair had John McMurray to guide him (as well as his own Christian Socialism). Who are Cameron’s intellectual heroes? Kirsty Allsopp? Gok Wan?
The Tories have not gone through the same ideological rebirth, merely got a new website. They have no intellectual core, just a big advertising budget. There has been no clause IV moment under Cameron, only endless recalibration and calculation. The hardcore Thatcherites are still there, holding their tongues and biding their time.
Bale’s book explains why the Tories lost, and how they hope to win. Like Norman Fowler’s recent book, A Political Suicide, it also serves as a timely warning to Labour about the dangers of self-indulgence and introspection as much as an account of the Tories’ shortcomings. But most of all, it describes a Conservative party so desperate to win an election that it is willing to try anything, except fundamental change. Bale quotes a member of a Conservative focus group who puts his finger on it, as only focus group participants can.
He ‘compared the Tories to a British telephone box, which looks appealing on the outside, but if you open the door it smells really bad’.