When Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief-of-staff, was asked what his main objective was after the 1997 landslide general election, he famously replied that he wanted to win again. British Prime Minister David Cameron did not expect to secure a majority in May. But having done so, he is already instructing his cabinet colleagues, individually and collectively, to map out “the road to 2020”. Remember: He will not be contesting that general election himself, 1789 days hence. Having decided that the logical corollary of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 is a two-term limit for prime ministers — an unofficial, Anglicised version of the 22nd amendment of the US constitution — he will step aside at some point (though not, I suspect, as soon as some people think) and let his party choose a new leader to fight the election.
Yet, whoever ends up operating the party machine, so to speak, the software — iTory 2020 — will already be in place. The elements are always the same, I am told. Cabinet members have been dispatched by Cameron to maximise support among our old demographic friend, “hardworking families”. This is more than rhetoric: as Liam Byrne argues in his withering new analysis of Labour’s defeat, the party’s grip on the blue-collar vote is in crisis. The PM’s intention is to march even deeper into this psephological terrain, declaring the Conservatives to be the natural party of workers and strivers. Tory strategists are reaching for their copies of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, a manual for centre-right parties seeking to ditch their association with privilege and impermeable elites.
Every Tory mention of “aspiration”, every free school opened, every incentive to build new housing, every tax cut for low earners, should be seen as part of this 2020 strategy. Second, and no less important, Cameron acknowledges that the Tories have a long way to go before their claims to be the party of social justice and compassion are taken as seriously as he hoped when he became leader in 2005. When I interviewed him during the campaign, he complained that “another frustration of coalition” had been the necessity, in the interests of bipartisan harmony, to allow the Lib Dems to take the credit for most measures protecting the vulnerable. He conceded, too, that the scale of the economic task had meant that there was less time than he had hoped for social reform and the ideas gathered under the numinous billing of the “big society”.
This struck me then, and strikes me now, as a false dichotomy. A Conservative-led or fully Conservative government that is taking painful measures and presiding over what the PM himself has called “an age of austerity” needs to work doubly hard to persuade voters that its motives are decent. The great test of the prime minister’s commitment to his 10-year-old “decontamination” project will be welfare reform, his domestic priority both for fiscal reasons (there is plenty of deficit yet to be cut) and the dictates of political logic (Nick Clegg was indeed, as he often asserted to unappreciative voters, a brake upon Tory ambitions to cut working-age benefits). No longer will George Osborne’s cuts or Iain Duncan Smith’s plans hit the big yellow speed-bump of the Lib Dem conscience. The road to 2020 is clear. Or clear of coalition politics, to be precise.
The chancellor has a little more than three weeks to decide how much detail he will provide in his July “stability” budget of the £12 billion (Dh68.37 billion) welfare cuts he requires. The politics of welfare often strike Tories as laughably simple. When the coalition announced an annual benefits cap of £26,000 a year for each household, the voters were so enthusiastic that the limit is now to be reduced to £23,000 — a plan to which Harriet Harman has declared even Labour to be “sympathetic”.
Yet, our collective attitude to welfare is much more nuanced than this would suggest. In the eyes of the great British public, an unchalked line separates — on the one hand — the deservedly robust measure against “scroungers” and “work-shy layabouts” from — on the other — the “brutal cut”, or “shocking imposition”, or “inhuman bureaucracy”.
Quite rightly, for example, public horror was triggered by Amelia Gentleman’s brilliant disclosures in this newspaper of the appalling way in which the French-owned company Atos conducted the work capability assessment and tested disabled or ill applicants for benefits. I have heard a senior Cameroon privately wish that the so-called “bedroom tax” had never been introduced: it strikes me as no accident that Clare Foges, until recently Cameron’s chief speechwriter, last week urged her former boss in a Times article to ditch this very penalty: “[The bedroom tax] is not working as had been hoped and will remain a fly in the one-nation ointment. Have a principled mea culpa moment and move on.”
That Cameron has already grasped that freedom from Nick Clegg does not mean freedom to do as he pleases. But he also knows that the immediate aftermath of an election victory, even by a slender majority, is the closest a prime minister gets to the latitude he craves. To reframe and to personalise the calculation, Cameron understands that he must occupy his tribe as thoroughly as possible lest it becomes once more what it became in the 1990s: The Banging On About Europe party.
Whenever the issue of the European Union becomes a matter of legitimate discussion, the Tory toddler will always be close to a restaurant-clearing tantrum. The key is to keep it occupied and distracted — as far as humanly possible. The “road to 2020” is one such distraction between now and the EU referendum. But it is also a measure of how Cameron’s horizons have grown over the years. He has managed a coalition.
In his second term, he is presiding over a small majority. And, as Labour devours itself obligingly, he now aspires to nothing less than to redraw the Tory map — geographical and ideological — for a world transformed since Margaret Thatcher last accomplished the task. Cameron’s style is very different and his electoral record modest by comparison.
But the party political landscape has changed spectacularly since 1979. Within this life-long pragmatist there lurks a politician with an eye on posterity and prodigiously grander ambitions than he first declared. To save his party, save the union, save Britain’s place in Europe: All this is on his list, and much more. Only now can we see that, before he goes, Cameron wants to be hailed as the man who defined 21st-century Conservatism.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Matthew d’Ancona is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books.
