The other day, I posted concerning five things to do to avoid throwing away the election, namely being right, worthy of victory, clear, relevantly substantive, and proportionate. Some of you expressed an interest in how I thought we were doing on these.
I'd like to explain what I think about that by contrasting our current approach with that in 2001. Specifically, in 2001 we were wrong, not worthy of victory, not relevantly substantive, and disproportionate. It was, on the other hand, perfectly clear that we were all of these things!
We were wrong about saving the pound - and we knew it. We knew Blair wouldn't take us in, and he didn't. Furthermore, the Party didn't believe in lots it was told to argue - we wanted to be much more radical and thought our Party's platform small-minded compared with the glories of the past. We were not worthy of victory, for we were an incoherent rabble, more interested in paranoia about the EU and petty concerns about gypsies than about the big issues of the day. We lacked substantive policies on the key issues - we had nothing to say about the health service, nothing of interest to say on the economy, our schools policy was at best only half-baked, we were bereft of ideas for welfare reform, and we had no vision of military intervention that began to compete with Blair's. We were also disproportionate, hysterically predicting recession at least three times when there wasn't one and exaggerating the significance of asylum (unfortunately distracting from the fact that we had the right policies on that issue and that it was indeed important - just not as important as we pretended).
What about now? Well, until a week or so back we had the huge advantage of being right on the big political issue of the day when Labour knew itself to be wrong - i.e. we said that spending needed to be cut, cut significantly, and cut quickly, whilst Brown pretended that it didn't. The business journalists knew we were right. The political journalists knew we were right. The Labour MPs knew we were right. Labour was imploding on the point, with repeated semi-open disputes between Prime Minister and Chancellor and the government in chaos and coup. I believe that if we'd kept at our line, Labour would have gone further and further down in the polls, and would have been lucky to reach 25% by Election day. Now, spooked by one quarter's GDP figures, we have given up our strongest card, and the journalists no longer believe that we are the truth-holders on this issue. Unless Labour implodes again (which is possible) we won't get this card back.
What about other matters? Well, in general the leadership of the Party is much more convinced of what it is arguing (NHS nightmares aside) than it was in 2001. Cameron has a radical transforming agenda in mind that would change society and change the way public services are delivered if implemented. I think he's genuinely convicted on the green stuff and the localism - indeed Cameron himself is probably convicted of his position on the NHS (even if no-one else is). That much of the Party is under the delusion that Cameron is some kind of minimal-change manager who would leave things much as they are is a manifestation of one of the great paradoxes of Cameron's team - they've somehow convinced everyone that they are slick PR men focused on the message, when in fact their PR has been consistently awful, in particular by totally failing to convey what they are about.
I'd say that as a Party we are much more worthy of victory now than in 2001 - at the very least in comparison with the walking zombie-zone that is Gordon Brown's Labour Party.
As noted above, we are anything but clear. And our lack of clarity, which has damaged Cameron since the beginning, has become worse recently. I think that's mainly because we don't want to tell, at the moment, rather than because we don't know. But we'll need to sort the clarity point out once we win.
We were definitely relevantly substantive until very recently. The big issue of the day was excessive spending. Our position was to cut more than Labour and to cut sooner. We also have big and important things to say on education. Our Europe policy is splendid, though our approach (giving the impression that it's a low priority matter that can be left to another day) is little short of suicidal. We've gone down a dark dead end on the NHS, but may yet work out a clever wheeze to get ourselves out. And we have green issues and the family to talk about if we need to.
Probably the strongest of these five for Cameron has been his proportionality (Europe aside - see above). Where others wanted him to be shrill and to exaggerate problems, he refused and engaged positively. When the financial crisis came he managed to change tack dramatically and went from sunny uplands Conservative to grim-faced austerity-monger with barely a blink. I personally disagree very strongly with him on MP's expenses, but his mood is the public mood on this.
So, we've blown our strongest being-right card (spending cuts), we lack clarity about almost anything, and we aren't proportionate regarding the EU, but overall I think it's pretty good. Now we've lost the automatic high ground on the spending thing, we're going to need a bit of a relaunch - obviously we'll need to go back to talking about the economy, but we can't hope for the same routing of Labour on the issue that we were getting before. Instead, we'll need to lean more on other issues - our splendid schools reform package; an appropriately re-pitched adaptationist green agenda; our excellent Europe reform policy; and we may need to supplement these with some kind of vision of Britain's future place in the world (on which I'll say more another time).
Victory's still there to be had. We now need to press on to the finish line.
