It is often said that oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them. As I've written before, I think that that is wrong. In my view, almost all of the time after the Atlee government, the Labour Party did not win elections; the Conservatives lost them. My thesis was: Britain is, and for decades has been, a Conservative country; if Conservatism of a plausible and competent form is on offer they vote for it; if the Conservative Party really screws up, then the voters get the Labour Party in until we sort our act out, then vote Conservative again.
On this basis, I have often argued that the 2001 election was possible to win. It was all about us. We were completely useless in 1997 and deserved to lose. I naively thought we would learn our lesson from the 1997 defeat and sort our act out by 2001, but unfortunately we were almost equally as useless (albeit in a different way) in 2001 as in 1997. We went on and on about Europe and gypsies and asylum seekers and lots of nonsense that no-one cared about, had almost nothing to say on the public services that we didn't ourselves consider an embarrassment (even our Free Schools policy was only half baked), and on the key issue of the economy all we had to offer was unfunded tax cuts based on the last refuge of the political charlatan - savings on fraud and waste. In 2001 people voted Labour because we left them no choice.
I had thought that a great problem. a terrible danger. I feared that if people voted Labour twice, it might start to seem a natural thing to do, instead of the aberrant, unnatural thing it had always been in the past. And so it proved. For 2005 was the first election for decades that was not about us at all. We could never have won in 2005, no matter how well we did (and to my astonishment, as a Portillo fan, IDS actually did very well between 2001 and 2003). 2005 was not about us. It was about Labour: did you favour Tony Blair because he had managed the economy well and his military adventures had been mainly successful, or did you despise him because he had failed on his domestic reform agenda and his Iraq war had gone badly wrong?
I wonder whether, with the local elections this year, we might have returned to natural politics again. Is it possible that it has become all about us again; that, no matter what Gordon Brown and the Labour Party does over the next two years, what will determine the result of the next general election will be what we do? If we screw up - if we are extreme or flaccid, or empty or nasty, or dogmatic or incoherent, or rigid or opportunistic, then we shall lose. But if we get it right, then even the advantages of office, be they played ever so skilfully, cannot save Gordon Brown.
I wonder...
