In so many ways, David Cameron has been a sound, decent and competent Prime Minister. He’s allowed his Cabinet ministers to get on with their jobs, supervised a historic programme of social and economic reform, and brought ease and grace back to 10 Downing Street. His loyalty to his ministers has been admirable, and his management of the Coalition excellent. So far, so good. But the prime minister also - like all leaders - has significant weaknesses. The Maria Miller episode has brought them into the open, exposing structural problems inside Downing Street as well as casting a troubling light on Cameron’s personality. These characteristics first became apparent nearly three years ago, when the prime minister allowed himself to be drawn much too closely into the scandal concerning wrongdoing at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. The revelations that flowed into the public domain were so lamentable, and so unfitting to the post of prime minister, that they inflicted permanent damage on Cameron’s reputation. The Maria Miller affair is not as serious. Nevertheless it has once again exposed Cameron as lacking in some of the basic qualities that the British people feel entitled to look for in a leader. Confronted with last week’s events, the prime minister needed only to ask himself a simple question: what is the right thing to do? Had he done that, he would have got rid of his Culture Secretary on the spot. By now the episode, and indeed Mrs Miller herself, would have been forgotten. But he appears to have asked a completely different question, typical of the modern school of clever-dick politicians: can we get away with it? Having asked the wrong question, Cameron and the incompetent team that now surrounds him inevitably came up with the wrong answer. They concluded that Mrs Miller’s political career was salvageable. Not much can be done about the damage to his reputation. After the Murdoch and Miller episodes, he is destined to go down in history as a poor judge of character. But this is not a complete disaster. Harold Wilson is an example of a British premier who surrounded himself with the most unappetising and low-grade people and got away with it. More urgently, Cameron now has the opportunity to learn the lessons from the Miller affair, and confront the weakness and incompetence of the Downing Street machine. It has been an open secret for years that Cameron’s political operation has been below par. MPs often remark on it. Ministers privately complain about it. Often they point the finger at individuals, frequently citing Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, as the main source of the problem. The unfortunate Llewellyn tends to be accused of failing to “exert grip from the centre”. Be that as it may, the real issue is structural, and dates back to David Cameron’s early months as Tory leader. The future prime minister, modelling himself on Tony Blair, chose to treat the Conservative Party as a branch office rather than an autonomous institution. There are various manifestations of this philosophy, but the most obvious is the presence of Grant Shapps and Lord Feldman of Elstree as “co-chairmen” of the Conservative Party. Lord Feldman is a tennis-playing friend of the prime minister who served alongside him on the Brasenose May Ball Committee some 25 years ago. His credentials for the chairmanship are unknown. Shapps counts for little. He is the type of politician that the late Sunday Express editor John Junor, borrowing a line from Rabbie Burns, used to define as a “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”. He has been almost invisible throughout the Miller business, meaning that the ordinary membership of the Tory party have had no voice. Scroll back a few years, and Tory chairmen were resounding and independent figures: Woolton, Thorneycroft, Whitelaw, Tebbit. They were senior members of the government, whereas the hapless Shapps is merely one of that almost limitless congregation of “ministers with a right to attend Cabinet”. The central point is this: the Miller situation would never been possible with a proper Tory chairman. Woolton, Thorneycroft, Whitelaw and Tebbit would have had the authority and the courage to inform the prime minister of the profound outrage felt by the ordinary Tory membership over the moral squalor of Mrs Miller’s financial arrangements. Not so Shapps and Feldman. Either they were not listened to or (much more likely) they said nothing. Their real job now is to articulate the troubled moral sensibility of the Conservative leadership to the members, not to tell the leadership what the grassroots think. This helps explain why Tory membership now stands at well under half the 250,000 inherited by David Cameron in 2005. John Strafford, one of the best-known party activists, tells me that he now believes it has fallen below 100,000. We now come to the post of political secretary, critical to the success of earlier Tory prime ministers. His or her role is to liaise with the party at large, monitor the mood in Parliament, ensure the smooth running of everyday business and, above all, to anticipate and head off trouble. A good political secretary would never have allowed the prime minister to ignore the strength of feeling among MPs about Mrs Miller. Cameron effectively abolished the role of political secretary when he entered Downing Street. The title is held by Stephen Gilbert - but his most important function is to oversee party activities such as campaigning and candidate selection. This means that Gilbert simply does not have the time and energy to carry out the traditional tasks performed by a political secretary. In any case, he does not enjoy the relationship of deep intimacy and trust with the prime minister that is essential if the political secretary is to do his job well. His role is simply to enable Downing Street (and in particular George Osborne, the de-facto party chairman) to exert direct control over Tory central office. Meanwhile, Craig Oliver, the director of communications, is not up to the job. Insiders say that he is good at providing television pictures and other photographs that present the prime minister in a wholesome light. Otherwise, this former BBC employee is well out of his depth. Much of the confusion of the last week is down to his poor judgment and mismanagement. Coming just as campaigning starts for the European elections, the timing of the Maria Miller resignation could hardly be worse. But all is not lost, if only David Cameron displays good sense and humility in the wake of this week’s disaster. The prime minister needs to appoint a commanding, independent new Tory chairman, a new director of communications, and establish a restructured political office in Downing Street. More important still, he must show that he is capable of telling the difference between right and wrong. If he can do that, next year’s general election can still be won. In so many ways, Cameron has been a fine prime minister, with serious achievements to his credit. But he does need to wake up fast.
The Telegraph Group, Ltd, London, 2014.
