Conservative party: low politics on the high wire

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/05/editorial-comment-low-politics-high-wire

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David Cameron can sometimes appear, as he occasionally did in interviews on Sunday, like a pre-Thatcher leader of a post-Thatcher Conservative party. By instinct and in manner the prime minister is still in many respects a recognisably centrist patrician Tory in the Harold Macmillan mode.

But he leads a party whose decisive embrace 30 years ago of low-tax individualism, the small state and English nationalism have moved it in a decisively rightwing direction ever since. This journey has left the Tories burdened with an enduring reputation for nastiness and struggling to reacquire the UK-wide majority that once seemed theirs by right.

The result, with the Conservative party persistently trailing Labour as the 2015 general election looms, is that Mr Cameron's leadership, partly because of his own mistakes, is too often a balancing act. He finds himself compelled to be a high-wire artist to survive.

The prime minister's interviews on Sunday effectively fired the starting gun on what is likely to feel like a 16-month general election campaign. He made clear that the May 2015 Tory election campaign is likely to focus on four principal issues – the economy, the public finances, immigration and Europe. That much was perhaps already fairly predictable.

Two things had, however, been less clear than they are now. The first is the continuing priority, in both party political and public spending terms, that the Tories intend to attach to older people as voters and as recipients of state financial support.

The second is the extent to which Mr Cameron proposes to put migration at the centre of an EU strategy that is as much about Tory party management as the UK national interest. In both cases, there is a significant level of improvisation and of trying to present a contradictory policy as something more coherent than it actually is.

The heart of Mr Cameron's message ywas the well-trailed confirmation that the annual rise in the state pension will be protected under a Tory government. The partisan reason for this pledge is obvious. Older people are more likely to vote, more anxious about risk and are better disposed towards the Tories.

But the pledge inescapably raises the question of how such commitments will be paid for. Here Mr Cameron flannelled and blunted the impact of what he was trying to say. His refusal to commit to maintaining existing benefits to the elderly, like fuel allowances and television licences, suggests that he may in fact have to rob pensioner Peter to pay pensioner Paul.

And his evasiveness on top-rate income tax suggests he knows that a package of higher-rate tax handouts for the well-off and further welfare cuts for the poor – which would be popular among Thatcherites – would not add up either fiscally or politically. There are a lot of serious loose ends here.

Nevertheless, knowing that his party is still trailing Labour in the polls – though trailing by a little less than it has done over the past year – it was not unreasonable for Mr Cameron to tailor his message to a group of voters who are most likely to provide the Conservatives with the overall majority they crave. But Mr Cameron makes things difficult for himself. His reluctance to challenge his own party makes it harder for the Tories to achieve that majority.

That task remains daunting. The opinion polls and the electoral system both favour Labour. The scale of the challenge was restated in black and white at the weekend by Lord Ashcroft's newly published polling, which finds that the longed-for majority remains extremely elusive.

It is underscored by recent criticisms by Tory modernisers like Ryan Shorthouse of Bright Blue and former No 10 speechwriter Danny Kruger that the party is too focused on the votes it is losing to Ukip on the right and insufficiently attentive to the voters it has neglected in the centre.

Going into 2014, Mr Cameron is less unpopular than the other party leaders. But a combination of circumstance and temperament means he is consistently failing, as he again did on Sunday, to make the case for the kind of majoritarian Conservative project he once claimed to offer.

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