A Bit Less Bunny-Hugging and a Bit More Bunny-Boiling’? Qualifying Conservative Party Change under...

‘A Bit Less Bunny-Hugging and a Bit More

Bunny-Boiling’? Qualifying Conservative

Party Change under David Cameron

Tim BaleDepartment of Politics and Contemporary European Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1

9RG, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

The Conservatives appear to have established a clear and consistent opinion polllead over the Labour government. Some would suggest that this change of fortunesis connected to the ‘modernization’ undertaken by David Cameron. This articleexamines the extent to which the Conservative Party can be said to have changed ina manner that political scientists might regard as significant. From the comparativeliterature on party change, it derives five dimensions and associated indicators ofchange; it then proceeds to measure the Conservative Party against them. It findsthat the extent of change — both actual and perceived — is easily overstated, partlybecause ‘Team Cameron’ has always had to tread carefully and particularly givensignificant adjustments made to the Party’s course after the difficult summer of2007. When it comes to the relationship between change and success, only amodicum of the former may be needed to achieve the latter given that elections areas much lost by governments as they are won by oppositions.British Politics (2008) 3, 270–299. doi:10.1057/bp.2008.7

Keywords: party change; Conservative; David Cameron; modernization; GordonBrown; centre ground

Introduction

Political parties are complex organizations with multiple levels, sites ofauthority and goals (Panebianco, 1988). They are also brands — heuristic shortcuts for voters who have little time and little interest in politics (Snyder andTing, 2002). Change is highly problematic on both counts. Organizationalconsensus on what needs changing is difficult to achieve and, even then, there isno guarantee that intention will produce action, still less that action will resultin success. Brand perceptions are very sticky: people do not change their mindabout a party easily or quickly, even when a new man or woman takes over.Taking on the leadership of a political party, then, is a formidable challenge,especially when, as an organization, it is weak and, as a brand, it is tarnished oreven ‘toxic’. This was precisely the situation faced by David Cameron when, in

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December 2005, he became the fourth man to be elected leader of theConservative Party since its crushing defeat by Labour in 1997.

Fast-forward 2 years or so and the party’s fortunes appeared to have beentransformed. After a temporary ‘Brown bounce’ in the summer of 2007, theend of the year saw the Conservatives achieving the kind of consistentlysignificant opinion poll leads that suggested that they were at last seriouscontenders for power once again, even allowing for an electoral system thatputs them at a clear disadvantage. Whether this means that the Tories will infact triumph in 2009 or 2010 is not a question we can answer. Instead, we askwhether this apparent change of fortune means that the Conservative Party —both as a brand and as an organization — can be said to have changed in amanner that political scientists might regard as significant. To answer ourquestion, we derive from the comparative literature on party change fivedimensions and associated indicators of change; we then proceed to measurethe Conservative Party against them, all the while acknowledging that politicsis the interaction of individuals, institutions and ideas. The exercise leads us toargue that the extent of change is easily overstated, particularly givensignificant adjustments made to the Party’s course from late August 2007onwards. We conclude by discussing the relationship between change andsuccess, suggesting that only a modicum of the former be needed for the latter.

Before beginning, however, we should note that academic analysis of theCameron period is understandably in its infancy. British Politics, however, hasalready set the pace, publishing three articles on the Party since its launch,while one of its co-editors has also written elsewhere on the dangers of filingCameron’s ‘post-Thatcherite cross-dressing’ under c for consensus or, indeed,w for wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing (Kerr, 2007). The first British Politics piece, byDavid Sanders (2006), focused on a particular challenge — but also a possibleopportunity — for the party, namely its difficulty in picking up support amongpublic sector workers. The other two were published simultaneously. The firstof these (Denham and O’Hara, 2007a) was a comprehensive look at‘modernization’ in the Conservative Party since 1945 which then fed into adiscussion of the leadership contest of 2005 and the conclusion that anymodernization undertaken by Cameron would not necessarily win thewholehearted support of the party, nor, on the evidence of the past, guaranteeit electoral victory. The third article (Dorey, 2007) — an impressivelycomprehensive (if inevitably interim) examination of Cameron’s apparentattempt to disavow Thatcherism and ideologically reposition his party in thecentre ground of British politics — likewise concluded that the attempt, albeitin its author’s view genuine and far-reaching, was also unlikely to produce theelectoral goods. This article differs on two counts. Firstly, although absolutelydetermined to heed Kerr’s warning against either swallowing modernizationwhole or simply writing it off as all spin and no substance, it interrogates and

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British Politics 2008 3

qualifies the extent to which David Cameron has delivered the actuality ratherthan the appearance of change. Secondly, it suggests that, even if change ismore modest than many assume, this may not jeopardize the Party’s chances ofdefeating Labour.

Measuring Party Change

What do political scientists believe constitutes real change for a political party?Unusually perhaps, there is wide agreement in the comparative literature onparty change on a number of points. For a start, there is a consensus thatparties — especially big, old parties — have to adapt when they are in trouble(see Adams et al., 2004): as one recent case study (Cheng, 2006, 368) puts it,

Adaptation, clearly, is the dividing line betweenydecline (either by rapidincineration or slow decay) and rebound (either through strategic recoveryor a total reformation or rebirth)y.Adaptation requires a party first tosurviveydefeat and then to embrace a strategy enabling it to return to power(or at least stay in the game).

But scholars in the field also agree that adaptation, however necessary, isdifficult ‘either because of entrenched interests or because of the weight ofhistorical legacy’ (Langston, 2006, 397) that affect all complex organizations,or simply because politicians tend to live, and prefer to live, in what amounts toan ideological comfort zone (see Budge, 1994; see also Bale, 2006a). And theytend to agree (and indeed concentrate on) the drivers of change, the mostcommonly cited independent variables being external shock (normally electoraldefeat or loss of office), change in the dominant faction and (especially) achange of leader (see, e.g., Harmel and Tan, 2003; see also Wilson, 1980).Finally, they are essentially in agreement about what constitutes change or atleast where to look for it. In their seminal work on the issue, Harmel and Janda(1994, 277) set the tone when it came to the dependent variable(s) by declaringparty change to encompass ‘all self-imposed changes in party rules, structures,policies, strategies or tactics’.

There is, however, less uniformity when it comes to operationalization.Harmel and Janda in subsequent work subject written secondary and primarysources to what they call ‘judgemental coding procedures’ covering a largenumber (26 to be precise) of organizational variables and scarcely fewer (17)issue variables covering party stances on particular policies (see Harmel et al.,1995, 2, 25). Those who cite their work, however, do not replicate their methodand opt instead for more focused, qualitative, case studies that make use ofboth secondary and primary sources to assess change over a specified period(see Bille, 1997; Muller, 1997; Cheng, 2006; Langston, 2006; Duncan, 2007).This approach avoids imposing an overly abstract straitjacket on particular


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events but runs the risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees. So while it isadopted here, the account produced is explicitly organized around five selecteddimensions and then indicators of party change based on the extensive listcompiled by Harmel and his colleagues, with party change defined (as perHarmel and Janda, 1994, 275) as ‘alteration or modification in how parties areorganized, what human and material resources they can draw upon, what theystand for and what they do’. The dimensions are:

(1) personnel;(2) organizational rationalization and retooling;(3) policy selection, or at least emphasis;(4) explicit distancing from past practice;(5) the facing down of internal opposition to 1, 2, 3 and 4.

If a party has, like the Conservative Party, come to be seen as too far from thecentre and unrepresentative by the majority of voters, who locate themselvesin the middle of the political spectrum and who see themselves as ‘ordinary’(see King, 2006, 162–168) then it needs to signal its move back towards them.It also needs to ensure that it has the infrastructure, and the men and materiel,to translate even a slim advantage into a winning one. It can do this by:

(a) appointing fresh faces unconnected with past ‘failure’ to its front-benchteam and its list of candidates, and revitalize its membership;

(b) equipping local parties in marginals with the human and financial resourcesthey need to win (even if that means transfers of such resources from otherareas) and getting a grip on the party’s bureaucracy and research andmedia operation;

(c) de-emphasizing (although not ignoring completely) the issues it tradition-ally ‘owns’, and ranging into enemy territory;

(d) pointing out (in the least damaging but still convincing way possible) whereit went wrong in the past and how it will make sure it does not make thesame mistakes again;

(e) containing (and if possible be seen to quash) internal opposition to a, b, cand d.

Taking each of these dimensions and indicators in turn, to what extent hasDavid Cameron, whose manifest skills and strengths suggest he has potentialto become one of the Party’s most effective leaders yet, managed to change theConservatives?

Personnel

The Tory Front Bench is undoubtedly full of first-rate politicians, notwith-standing criticism from some quarters that not all of them are hungry enough


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for government and that William Hague, however talented, is a damagingreminder of the bad old days. It is true, however, that many key figures are notnotable moderates or ‘modernizers’ (Liam Fox and the now ex-front bencherDavid Davis), while those who could be so labelled have been moved to lesshigh-profile jobs after earning the ire of the grass roots (David Willetts andFrancis Maude) and, in one or two cases (Damian Green, immigrationspokesman springs to mind), have had to sit on their hands while the leaderasserts ownership of ‘their’ issues. That said, there have been promotions intoand up the Shadow Cabinet of those closely identified with change: obviousexamples are Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and, lower down, Grant Shapps.With the exception of Maude’s replacement as Party Chairman, CarolineSpelman, and Shadow Leader of the House, Theresa May, and most of thewomen, though, are still in the junior ranks. Moreover, many have suggested —rightly or wrongly — that the Chairmanship has been effectively downgraded bythe appointment of Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, as ElectionCoordinator, and in view of millionaire-donor Michael Ashcroft’s target seatsoperation moving into Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ).

Even now, however, there are few on the front bench who look or soundmuch like the country they want to govern. The same can still be said of theparty’s candidates, though how much difficulty (if any) this problem (if it is aproblem) causes in constituencies is difficult to gauge. David Cameron does nothave to transform the Conservative Party so that it looks and sounds exactlylike the average voter: in reality, after all, there is no such thing and, even ifthere was, Labour would struggle almost as much to do so. But it has to bechanged sufficiently in this respect to allow that voter to say to himself orherself that the Conservatives once again ‘represent/stand for people like me’.At the moment, there is scant polling evidence to suggest that this is muchmore the case now than it was, as Ashcroft (2005) pointed out in hiscoruscating post-mortem, Smell the Coffee, at the last election.

Outside Westminster, or at least when it comes to those who want to beinside Westminster, the leadership still has quite a lot to do — and hasencountered what has probably been the most serious rumbling resistance toany of its modernization agenda. In 2005, 19% of Conservative Partycandidates were women, although in its 50 most winnable seats the figure was12%, and in its 50 least winnable seats 42%. The so-called Priority List(nicknamed the A-List), which was designed to improve the gender and ethnicbalance of Conservative candidates by institutionally ‘encouraging’ (ratherthan by ultimately obliging) constituency parties to adopt people with theleadership’s seal of approval, created a great deal of discontent, especially afterprocedures were amended in August 2006 when it became obvious that the listwas not having the desired impact.1 Amidst continued accusations of ‘politicalcorrectness’ and ‘tokenism’ riding roughshod over meritocracy — much of the


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flak being very personally directed against the then Chairman Francis Maude— conditions were relaxed somewhat in January 2007 to allow constituenciesmore of a choice: officially anyway, they would be able to pick from the muchbigger ‘approved’ (as opposed to the ‘priority’) list as long as at each stage ofselection half of those on offer would be women.

This setback may well have limited the undoubted progress made initially.Grassroots website ConservativeHome (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/)estimated in July 2007 that a Conservative government with an overallmajority could boast as many as 50 or 60 women and half a dozen black andminority ethnic MPs (up from 17 and 2, respectively), although it noted thatthe percentage of women chosen as candidates had dropped to below 30% bythe end of 2007, by which time almost all winnable seats had selected — a factthat may, it reported, have encouraged CCHQ to get ‘A-listers’ into theremainder by backdoor methods (see ‘Is CCHQ renewing efforts to promoteA-listers?’ ConservativeHome, 4 December 2007). Whether or not suchefforts boost the total, observers have noted that those already selectedcame from traditional Tory backgrounds such as the law and the city, meaningthat however feminized the party will be after the next election (ambitionsconcerning disabled and ethnic candidates seem to have been put on theback-burner) it will not go into it looking much like 21st centuryBritain. Whether this will make much difference at a constituency level isdifficult to tell: after all the Tories won election after election in the20th century with an overwhelmingly male, white, middle-class and able-bodied set of candidates. But it will be highlighted by opponents as evidencethat ‘David Cameron’s Conservatives’ (the party label used — probably forthe first and last time — on the ballot paper at what turned out to be adisastrous by-election in West London in the summer of 2007) are ‘thesame old Tories’.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that more and more different kinds of peopleare joining the party or at least attending its events. According to theDaily Mail’s Quentin Letts, writing on 2 October 2007, the party faithful whodescended on Blackpool that autumn were ‘a little different from past Toryconferences. More Northern English accents. Fewer Ann Widdecombebattleaxes in bullet-proof tweeds’. But this kind of anecdotal impression isvery difficult either to rebut or to support. What we do know is that whenthe leadership ballot took place, there were 253,689 members — over 6,000more than were eligible to vote when, 9 months later, the party’s ratheranodyne statement of aims and values, Built to Last, was voted on. Wealso know that the turnout in the latter vote was only 27%. Unless thingshave changed since then — and presumably CCHQ would have trumpeted thefact if they had — it seems unlikely that David Cameron has attracted manynew members.


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Organizational rationalization and retooling

We now know, after decades during which the idea was derided in favour of theassumption that the media campaign at the centre was what counted, that localeffort makes a difference (Denver et al., 2004). The Conservative Party hasalways been plagued by the fact that its resources at the local level are far fromperfectly allocated. Although the party has over time made progress on thefinancial front, raising and spending more money in marginal seats than inseats it is never going to win or is unlikely to lose (see Johnston andPattie, 2007), the constituency parties with most volunteers and most moneyare still too often in the safest seats. Given the continuing and jealouslyguarded tradition of constituency autonomy — financial and otherwise — inthe Conservative Party, there seems to be little the leadership can directly do(especially compared to the Lib Dems and even Labour) to move thoseresources to where they are most needed at election time. Similarly CCHQ, andits predecessor, has always been something of a problem for the Conservatives,although perhaps less so when they are out of office.

‘Team Cameron’s’ move to get Michael Ashcroft — a severe critic of theparty’s 2005 effort — back on board by allowing him to bring his own targetseats initiative in-house seemed like a smart move. Despite attempts by Labourand other parties to suggest his influence was somehow illegitimate, there canbe little doubt that the money and other resources ploughed into potentiallywinnable constituencies over a period of time is likely to help the Party, or atleast offset the advantage conferred on incumbent MPs by their increasedcommunication allowances and, in Labour’s case, trade union funding. Thereis also some evidence that the Party’s attempt to do something systematic andlong term about its relative lack of presence in the north of England is realenough to pay off: ‘Campaign North’ literature produced for the Conserva-tive’s 2008 Spring Forum— held in Gateshead to show it was serious about theregion — boasted it had doubled its professional campaign staff in the previous6 months and that its campaign centres in Salford, Bradford and Newcastlewere now fully operational. Meanwhile, back at the centre, the Party, especiallynow that Ashcroft is on the inside again, is almost certainly spending asmuch, if not more than ever, on research. We cannot know yet whether theleadership is listening and adapting to its findings more than it did between1997 and 2005, when outside advice was sought but all-too-rarely acted upon.But its appointment in 2007 of James O’ Shaughnessy — a highly regarded andmedia-savvy modernizer recruited from the think tank Policy Exchange — asHead of Policy and Research suggests that the commitment to ‘progressive’thinking is more than merely cosmetic.

The leadership would also appear to have got a grip on its media operations.A noticeable improvement occurred after the appointment as head of media of


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former News of the World journalist Andy Coulson, who, notwithstandingearly rumours of tensions, appeared to work well with the eminence (not-so)grise behind Mr Cameron, his Director of Strategy, Steve Hilton. Coulson’sinfluence could supposedly be detected in what opponents tried to depict as a‘lurch to the right’ following a difficult summer in 2007 (see below). But so farthere appears to be no sign of a repeat of the situation under William Hague,where the longer-term modernization urged on him by Central Office’s researchstaff (and then by Francis Maude and Michael Portillo) gave way to the whollyunderstandable, but inevitably short termist, desperation of the leader’s mediateam (Amanda Platell and Nick Wood) to turn him from the apparently risibleTory Boy into the razor-headed man of the people (see Walters, 2001; see alsoGarnett and Lynch, 2003).

Policy selection and emphasis

David Cameron — supposedly under the influence of Steve Hilton — made abig play early on in his leadership for ground that was not traditionally Tory(even if, with a bit of imagination, a claim could be made that it was or shouldbe). Most famously, he expressed concern about the environment, and evencommitted the party — at least initially — to so-called Green taxes, as well aschanging the Party’s logo from a flaming torch into a more touchy-feely tree.Also prominent has been Cameron’s interest in development issues —symbolized by his (as it turned out unfortunately timed) trip to Rwanda inthe summer of 2007. But perhaps most important was the play he made(notably at the Party Conference in 2006) on the NHS — a public service thathe can convincingly claim (because of his son’s disability) to know somethingabout. Out went the idea that those going private should be subsidized to doso, and in came a promise to fight ‘Gordon Brown’s cuts’, irrespective, criticsargue, of whether the re-organizations and unit closures they are associatedwith are long overdue.

In part, this emphasis on the NHS was part of a wider strategy to attractthe votes of the middle-class, public sector professionals that the Conservativeshave failed to win in recent years — votes that may be up for grabs asthose professionals chafe at the targets and monitoring foisted on them by thegovernment (Sanders, 2006). And it was an exercise (as was ‘going green’) inboth ‘love-bombing’ Liberal Democrats and ‘brand decontamination’ — anattempt to shrug off the ‘nasty party’ reputation by talking about ‘nice’ thingsin the hope that the party would thereby obtain ‘permission to be heard’across the board.2 But it was also a fairly daring move onto traditionalLabour territory — and one which polls suggested stood a chance of resonatingwith voters hit with tales of hospital deficits and closures which seemed to


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make a nonsense of record spending (and even, it seems, their own largelypositive experiences).

By the end of 2007, however, it looked as if neither the NHS (and publicservices more generally) nor environmental issues would remain the only, letalone the main, focus of the Tories’ policies. Initially in the late summer of thatyear, as their solid opinion poll lead melted away in the face of the much-hypedBrown bounce, it looked as if their foray onto Labour territory might becomeeven more daring or, in some eyes, desperate: in early September, ShadowChancellor George Osborne declared — much to the chagrin of traditionalTory supporters in the media — that a Conservative government would matchthe Labour government’s spending totals for the next 3 years. However, evenas the Party, in the eyes of some of its supporters, was selling the pass onspending, its leader was beginning to focus (to the evident relief of supportersin the press and the blogosphere) on more traditional Tory territory. Stung bycriticism about his carrying on with a planned trip to Rwanda while hisconstituency was threatened with floodwater, Cameron used an interview onBBC radio’s agenda-setting Today programme on 20 August to talk about theneed to get tough on what he (or perhaps Andy Coulson) labelled ‘Anarchy inthe UK’. A few days later, on 29 August, he again used the BBC (this time theNewsnight programme) not only to repeat the tough message on crime andpromoting the traditional (married) family but also to assert that immigrationput ‘too great a burden on public services’ and ‘needed to be better controlled’— hardly a radical statement but one which commentators immediatelydecided harked back to the ‘dog-whistle’ days of Lynton Crosby, Michael (andJohn) Howard’s election guru. This, and further announcements over thecourse of four or five weeks in which the Conservatives concentrated on tryingto scare the Prime Minister off calling an early election, suggested, in the wordsof veteran Tory journalist, Bruce Anderson, writing in the Independent on 15October 2007 that it was finally time for ‘a bit less bunny-hugging and a bitmore bunny-boiling’.

To opponents, such moves signified what they hoped to portray as a ‘lurchto the right’ — a swing back to the so-called ‘core’ vote strategy in the mannerof Cameron’s immediate predecessors, all three of whom had initially promisedcentrist modernization before retreating (see Denham and O’Hara, 2007a, 178–185), or at least choosing, possibly quite rationally, to fight elections on theonly issues where they had leads over Labour (see Green, 2007). Yet the movecould also be characterized as the next logical phase (albeit perhaps acceleratedunder pressure of a possible early election) in the Hilton strategy: the brandhaving been ‘decontaminated’, the party was now ‘rebalancing’ — moving onto those issues where it reflected majority opinion but which had previouslybeen impossible to talk about without sounding ‘nasty’ and ‘right wing’. Tosome, this even represented a welcome move into what was dubbed (notably by


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the website ConservativeHome) ‘the politics of and’, namely the idea that theParty’s traditional concerns — a smaller state, clamping down on crime andimmigration, strong families, national sovereignty — were not incompatiblewith a support for things like action on climate change, civil liberties andequality, poverty reduction and improving schools. In a speech to candidatesand supporters on 7 September 2007, Cameron himself signalled implicitsupport for this idea by arguing against the ‘false choices’ being urged uponhim by left and right (see also David Cameron ‘What makes me Conservative’,Telegraph, 8 September 2007) — a point reasserted by his closest lieutenantGeorge Osborne in an interview with the Spectator just prior to the PartyConference in Blackpool (see ‘Inside George Osborne’s war room’, Spectator,26 September 2007). At the Party’s Blackpool conference a few weeks later,Cameron and his Shadow Ministers hinted at radical welfare reform andpromised tougher measures on crime, drugs and immigration, more streaming,opting out (and more Winston Churchill!) for schools, an automaticreferendum on all future moves to cede powers to the EU and the abolitionof inheritance tax on estates below one million pounds. But they also professeda desire to mend what, following former leader Iain Duncan Smith, they nowroutinely refer to as Britain’s ‘broken society’, thereby making the conference aperfect advertisement for this dual strategy.

Whichever of these interpretations is correct — ‘lurch to the right’, ‘next-phase’ or ‘the politics of and’ — the ‘rebalancing’ of the late summer/earlyautumn of 2007 effectively brought wavering Tory newspapers back on board(see ‘At last voters have a genuine choice’, Daily Mail, 4 October 2007).3 It alsoundermines the Party’s own claim to have moved, under David Cameron,decisively back into the mainstream or even the centre ground of Britishpolitics. So, too, does the fairly muted response of the leadership to the reportsof the Party’s Policy Groups, most of which were completed by the summer of2007.4 The Groups’ recommendations were by no means a surrender to NewLabour: even leaving aside the predictably deregulatory and tax-cutting report,Freeing Britain to Compete, produced by the group chaired by John Redwood,the emphasis was on loosening state control in favour of incentivizingindividuals, professionals and civil society groups. Nonetheless, theirrecommendations could have been cherry-picked for eye-catching policies thatwould symbolize the Conservatives ranging deep into enemy territory: obviousexamples include increasing the Carer’s Allowance and front-loading ChildBenefit (Social Justice Group); and establishing a national consumer body forNHS patients, guaranteeing the first year of employment for nurses and alliedprofessions completing healthcare training, working to re-engage GPs inresponsibility for the out-of-hours care and setting up a new national fund totarget public money into local schemes for medium-to-long term affordablerented housing (Public Services Group). Instead, they were given a broad


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welcome as feeding into the party’s ongoing policy process — one that isclearly very much (back) in the hands of the leadership and trusted lieutenantsin the Shadow Cabinet. Far from picking up and running with potentiallyheadline-grabbing suggestions that might appeal to liberal progressives, theleadership sometimes seemed more concerned with ruling some of them outbefore they could be exploited by their opponents. This was particularly true ofthe report by the Quality of Life Policy Group headed up by John Gummerand Zac Goldsmith, whose ideas on Green taxation and user charges (forexample, a ‘green miles’ allowance for each individual beyond which theywould have to pay extra for their flights and paying for parking in out-of-townshopping centres) were viewed by many Tory supporters and MPs aselectorally suicidal or at the very least unlikely to impress anyone in the‘Dog and Duck’ — the apparently archetypal hang-out of the commonsensevoter (see ‘Tory MPs to ignore David Cameron’s green tax’, Telegraph, 15September 2007).5

But if, however, as the political editor of the Conservative-supporting newsweekly, the Spectator, put it after Blackpool, ‘[t]he hoodie-hugging, Polly-praising, huskie-drawn days are over’, this is unlikely to spell the end of theParty leadership’s self-professed bid for ‘the mainstream’ or at the very least itsdetermination not to get pulled too far to the right once again. In the lightof the Party’s stunning rise in the opinion polls after its conference and Browndeciding against an early election (events which saw the Tory rating, asmeasured by Mori, increase by 7% in just over a week), questions began to beraised, albeit sotte voce, about Osborne’s earlier declaration that anyConservative government elected would match Labour’s spending totals for3 years (see, e.g., ‘David Cameron should not renew George Osborne’sspending pledge’, ConservativeHome, 23 October 2007). Those doing thequestioning can argue that, according to the small print, the commitment is nota rolling one but holds only until 2011. But, inasmuch as the public registeredand remembered the promise, others argued that appearing to renege on itwould be unwise (see Finkelstein, 2007) — a strategic analysis, even thoughit came from those whom Osborne himself dismissively referred to as ‘uber-modernizers’, the leadership appears to share, notwithstanding the hopesof some supporters (see ‘Tories look to tax cuts to help economy’, Telegraph,26 February 2008).

Indeed, it became increasingly evident that, as the Party’s poll leadconsolidated and even grew, Cameron and his closest associates hoped to beable to pursue a mix of policies that would both reassure voters on tax andspend but also show them that the Tories had not forgotten their signatureconcerns. Cameron’s first set-piece speech on the need to curb immigration,made on 29 October 2007, was reasonable in tone but undoubtedlyrestrictionist in intent, while the title of the article that he wrote to trail the


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launch of the Party’s welfare policy in the New Year hardly suggested a softcentrism (see ‘I’ll axe 200,000 benefit cheats: Cam to hit bogus sick’, News ofthe World, 6 January 2008). February 2008, however, saw Cameron’s ShadowHealth Secretary suggest — misleadingly it turned out — that a Conservativegovernment might spend more on the NHS than Labour (see ‘Tories make28bn pledge to set the pace on NHS spending’, Times, 28 February). Thebeginning of the following month saw the Shadow Chancellor, in a high profiletelevision interview, promise ‘We will be squeezing budgets like welfare whichare a drag on the British economy’ (Andrew Marr Show, BBC, 9 March 2008);but the following week saw the Conservatives commit themselves to extendingrights to paternal leave and diverting resources to fund health visitors — amove widely seen, along with Cameron’s invitation to commercial television tofilm his young children at home, as a response to internal research suggestingthat the Party was still not seen as family-friendly (see ‘Cameron’s family-friendly policy undermined by leaked report’, Independent, 15 March 2008; seealso Table 5). It also saw the Party, not without some difficulty (see below),remind voters that it would not pursue tax cuts at the cost of economicstability. All this suggests not a decisive move back to the centre, nor a crude‘lurch to the right’ but an attempt to bob and weave between them.

Distance from the past

One of the key messages of research done in the aftermath of the 1997 landslideby Central Office staffers was that the party had not so much to apologize, butto admit to itself and to the public that it had got some things wrong. Part ofthe reason that those who did the research (some of whom came to be brandedPortillistas during some of the darkest days of the Hague leadership)6 ended upleaving for the very profitable — and possibly more influential — privatepolling sector was that this message was never really taken on board, let aloneacted upon: the last thing the party needed to do, many claimed, was to remindthe public of why they booted out the Tories so comprehensively. This wasunderstandable but it broke all the rules of corporate marketing in crisissituations (which suggests companies are best off making a full confession andthe most transparent and direct attempts to put things right). It also allowedthe party’s main opponent to characterize and define its period in office.

In fact, however, the confession called for by the so-called Portillistas inCentral Office was fairly tame. Far from calling for a repudiation ofThatcherism (of which, by and large, they were still huge admirers), theysimply wanted the party to admit that under John Major it had moved awayfrom its tenets, as well of course as letting sleaze get out of hand. Rather than amove to the centre, they wanted the leadership to emphasize that it would getback on track to the old emphases on, for example, a more assertive foreign


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policy and a renewed attack on higher taxes and public spending, the better toserve Britain’s aspirant majority. In short, the call for renewal was actually onefor renovation or even restoration.

Given this, the Conservative’s failure to move back to the centre between1997 and 2005 was arguably not simply one of action but one of analysis. Whatno-one was calling for was an admission that the party may even have gotthings wrong in the 1980s, let alone the 1990s. Not one ‘big beast’, for example,came forward to declare that, for all the party’s considerable achievements inliberalizing and dynamizing what had become a sclerotic, chaotic andconflictual country under Wilson and Callaghan’s quasi-corporate experiment,it might not have got everything right. It may, for example, have pushedprivatization (never, contrary to common wisdom, that popular with thepublic) just a little too far. Perhaps it had kept public spending on health andeducation just a little too tight. Possibly its crushing of the miners (and inparticular its subsequent ‘betrayal’ of those who broke the strike) might havebeen slightly better handled. Maybe it had failed to maintain economic stability(and in particular consistently reasonable interest rates) and do perhaps asmuch as it might have done on unemployment and social deprivation. Maybe,too, it had got just a little bit obsessive about Europe and forgotten that formost voters it was rather less pressing than some of the other issues justreferred to. Who knows, maybe even the strident promotion of individualadvancement and self-reliance may have contributed something — thoughobviously not as much as the decadent swinging 60s supposedly did — to ‘thebroken society’.

In short, if the Conservative Party had, to use the jargon, ‘overshot’ andplaced itself outside ‘the zone of acquiescence’ (see Norris and Lovenduski,2004, 90), there was no move to acknowledge that overshoot rather than tosuggest instead that it had got distracted from that very trajectory. The failureto do this stemmed from an inability, even among its most creative thinkers, toseparate the impressive election victories (and huge personal following amongparty activists) achieved by Mrs Thatcher and her far more ambivalent recordwhen it came to public policy and indeed public support. Whether thiswas because — as Wheatcroft (2005) and others have suggested — guilt overthe ‘matricide’ of 1990 prevented Conservative strategists from taking amore clear-eyed view or whether it was because they all-too-willingly woreideological blinkers is a moot point. But the failure to admit that things wentwrong — or rather that not everything was right — before John Majorsupposedly came along and spoiled everything in 1990, had the effect ofhobbling the party’s ability to produce a credible policy response to NewLabour. ‘Voters’, as the American political scientist V.O. Key (1966) sosuccinctly puts it, ‘are not fools’: political memories may be vague but they areimportant, and they are not that short. If Key was even partly right about the


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significance of retrospective voting, then clearly the Conservatives had tomount a sustained critique of all things Labour had messed up or failed to dosince 1997. But, by the same token, blaming Labour for absolutely everythingwrong with contemporary Britain may not wash.

Cameron, as Dorey (2007) notes, began by going further than hispredecessors in distancing himself from Margaret Thatcher. But admittingthe Party ‘got it wrong’ over apartheid South Africa, and repeating at everyopportunity that ‘there is such a thing as society’, hardly constitutes a whole-scale ‘disavowal’ — especially when, after the difficult summer of 2007 duringwhich Brown famously invited the Iron Lady to tea in Downing Street,Cameron has been notably keener to be seen to be spending time with her, andto be photographed doing so. In truth, Cameron has not so much admittedthat the 1980s threw up as many problems as it solved as sought to assert (as hedid in the first of two speeches to the Bournemouth conference in 2006) thatthings have moved on since Margaret Thatcher’s ‘magnificent achievements’.The distancing, then, has largely been from what are widely regarded as thefailures of the party since 1997 to reconnect with the electorate while inopposition, not from what it did while in office between 1979 until its firstlandslide defeat at the hands of Tony Blair.

Contrast this with what eventually became known as the New Labourproject but which had, in fact, been going on from 1983 onwards (see Shaw,1994; Fielding, 2002; Cronin, 2004). Between Neil Kinnock taking over andJohn Smith’s death, the party abandoned not only many of the policy positionsassociated with the so-called ‘longest suicide note in history’ (its 1983 electionmanifesto) but also made it clear there would be no return to the quasi-corporatist experiment it had — in vain — pursued during its time in officeduring the 1960s and 1970s. Tony Blair both re-emphasized this and tookthings a stage further by obliging the party to reconcile itself to many of thechanges wrought by the Conservatives after 1992: there would, for example, beno re-nationalization, no sweeping changes in industrial relations and noreturn to ‘tax and spend’. True, Labour, and its leader, continued to point tothe need to ‘save’ the NHS (and education) from Tory underinvestment,thereby maintaining the party’s leads on these core electoral issues as well assending out a positive signal to its own members. But it was also made clear toboth voters and members (and of course to the media) that the first prioritywas to preserve economic stability, particularly when it came to interest rates.This — and the promise to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ —was a deliberate (and at the time relatively successful) move onto keyConservative territory.

Labour, in short, did not let the Conservative government off the hook butit had the sense — some would even say the good grace — to admit that it hadgot quite a lot wrong, too. Obviously, the fact that the Wilson/Callaghan era


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was widely perceived as a failure while the Thatcher years have been hyped andmythologized made it easier for New Labour to confess to its sins than it is forCameron’s Conservatives. But a thoroughgoing distancing from the past onthe part of the latter could have involved a more balanced reassessment andre-interrogation of the aforementioned ‘magnificent achievements’. After all,many potential Tory voters do not necessarily remember the 1980s that wayand harbour concerns about a return to what the bulk of Conservativemembers still clearly regard, in contrast, as the ‘glory years’.

Facing down internal opposition

Internal opposition to David Cameron has been muted compared to thesniping — often from very close quarters — that William Hague andparticularly Iain Duncan Smith had to endure during their time as leaders. Theoverwhelming majority of Conservative MPs, even if they did not vote forCameron (see Denham and O’Hara, 2007b), see him as the party’s best or atleast only choice for leader, and are prepared to tolerate a lot of what some ofthem regard as ‘touchy-feely stuff’ if it delivers victory at the next election.There is a hard core on the right of the party who continue to believe that astress on traditional Tory issues will bring back mythical millions of frustratedabstainers (or UKIP voters) into the fold. But even many of these people areprepared to give Cameron his head as long as the party appears to be in with ashout of winning next time around.

This forbearance is not infinite, however. The Party’s self-inflicted row overselective grammar schools in the spring of 2007 illustrated that there are limitsbeyond which the leadership seemingly cannot tread without provoking aninternal (but very public) backlash. Or rather it showed that the Party isprepared to put up with a lack of emphasis on what are regarded astouchstones — tax cuts is another example — as long as they believe it derivesfrom strategic calculation rather than a genuine rethink on the principles atstake. David Willetts’ mistake was not so much restating his leader’s declaredintention not to turn the clock back to the 11-plus era as it was to mount arational, evidence-based critique of existing grammar schools’ contribution tosocial mobility and, by implication, the very principle of selection. Put bluntly,people in the party are prepared not to ‘bang on’ about things that pollingsuggests does not go down as well as it might with the public, but they are notprepared for the leadership to declare that what they think is — empirically ornormatively — wrong.7 That is why Cameron was able (with relative ease givenwhat might have happened) to diffuse an earlier row over leaving the EuropeanPeople’s Party — there would be a regrettable delay but the principleapparently remained intact.


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Since the ‘grammar schools row’, the publicly voiced internal oppositionencountered by Cameron has been little more than ‘noises off’ — criticism fromthe odd past donor/lender whom few voters know or remember (Stanley Kalmsand Johan Eliasch), from the odd ‘usual suspect’ (Edward Leigh, whose ‘faith,flag and family’ Cornerstone Group is accorded an influence and a cohesion bythe media that goes way beyond the reality), from the odd former strategistworrying that ‘nicey-nicey’ politics will not see the party back in power (LordSaatchi) and from the odd spurned candidate who is likely to disappearwithout trace (Ali Miraj). Even the brief media interest in the publication of apamphlet (Ancram, 2007) by a former deputy leader (which warned against‘insult[ing] the intelligence of the British people’, ‘trashing our past orappearing ashamed of our history’, and — that old favourite — ‘over relianceon opinion surveys and focus groups’) was hardly as serious as Labour tried tosuggest. Indeed, it may well have suited Mr Cameron quite nicely. Accused of a‘lurch to the right’ it gave him the chance, via an interview in The Sun (see‘Leader fury at party’s ‘‘oldies’’’, 6 September 2007) to re-state his modernizingcredentials (‘When you make changes you’ll get blasts from the past whosignify nothing’) at the same time as portraying himself as the natural successorto Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher (no Eden, Hume or Heath of course): italso allowed him to play the strong man (‘I want all Conservatives to thinkcarefully before opening their mouths’).

Slapping down people who most voters have never heard of, however, maynot deliver that much of a boost. That it has to be done at all risks perpetuatingthe impression that party unity is a problem, while the lack of an opponent thegeneral public perceives (rightly or wrongly) as genuinely worth defeating sendsout too weak a signal — it hardly ranks alongside Neil Kinnock dramaticallyrounding on Derek Hatton or Blair (and Prescott) forcing the party and thetrade unions to tear up Clause IV, eat the pieces and look grateful. It is ofcourse true, as Ancram himself pointed out, that the Tories ‘have never been adogmatic party and have no Clause IV’ and, as such, will never have ‘a ClauseIV moment’. But, so far anyway, critics could with some fairness argue thatConservative rank and filers have not been obliged publicly to renounce —rather than simply delay implementation of — any of their key goals. As aresult, the party has perhaps missed this particular opportunity to signal that ithas genuinely changed — albeit one that might have appealed only to thosenow dismissed as ‘uber-modernizers’.

Indeed, as long as the Party maintains its lead in the opinion polls, as well asits new-found willingness to talk about traditional Tory issues, it seems highlyunlikely that the leadership will face significant opposition unless and until itfails to deliver victory (outright or otherwise) at the next election. The regularsurvey of the Party’s grassroots by the ConservativeHome website is instructivein this respect. On the eve of the party conference, it discovered (but perhaps


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wisely chose not to reveal publicly) that 48% of those surveyed were satisfied,while 49% were dissatisfied with David Cameron. At the end of October,post-conference and after Brown ‘bottled’ the election, the situation wastransformed, with 89% of members satisfied with the Conservative leader andonly 11% dissatisfied, thereby moving him from a rating of minus one to plus78 in just one month. By November, it was plus 88, with 94% satisfied and only6% dissatisfied. Even allowing for a good deal of sampling error, the sheerextent of the change suggests that the leadership, as long as it sticks to thecurrent ‘winning formula’, is unlikely to face the kind of internal criticism thatprofound change might be expected to provoke. The idea that Cameron hasshort-circuited the Kinnock phase and leads a party to which, like Tony Blair,he can do anything he likes, however, is wrong. The revival in grassrootssupport for Cameron came about not so much because they were sodemoralized and defeated that they could do no other but because their leadershowed them — not before time some suggested — that he was ‘one of us’. Thepoll leads he was able to deliver from late October 2007 have undeniablyhelped, and will continue to do so. But many (perhaps the majority) ofmembers believe that those leads were founded on the turn toward moretraditional Tory policies.

Any attempt, then, by the leadership to move the Party out of its comfortzone again will have to be handled with care — and not just because of thedanger of provoking internal discontent. The potential for the latter, as wehave suggested, has not passed. Witness how the leadership had to scramble tosmooth over concern engendered by the announcement in March 2008 by theShadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Philip Hammond, that the Party’spolicy of no upfront, unfunded tax cuts might well mean a Conservativegovernment waiting until its second term to deliver lower taxes: Cameron andHague hit the Sunday politics shows to re-establish the ‘no upfront, unfunded’line (which Hammond had gone beyond) and reassure supporters that theParty’s ‘tax cutting instincts’ were still intact (see Tories confused over policyon tax cuts, Telegraph, 17 March 2008).

Given that there was already a debate reaching right up into the leadershipbetween ‘tortoises’ (who believed it was best, after the re-balancing of the earlyautumn, to switch back to more ‘centrist’ themes) and ‘hares’ (who believedthat the Party’s opinion poll lead gave it the green light to ditch thecommitment to match Labour’s spending plans and offer tax cuts), a debatewas perhaps predictable.8 But provoking an internal argument is not the onlydanger — and perhaps not the most serious one anyway since the Party’smembers, not withstanding their clear desire for tax cuts, proved less willingthan its supposed supporters in the media to go in all guns blazing against aleader they clearly believe is an electoral asset.9 Possibly a greater risk is thatthe attempt to have it both ways, to tack back and forth between traditional


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Tory issues and putatively more centrist policies, will leave voters confusedabout quite where it stands. The survey findings reported in Table 1 hint at thisproblem: while they undoubtedly contain some very encouraging news for theleadership concerning its attempt to convey change and credibility, they alsosuggest a degree of uncertainty.

Change and success

A major motivation for party change is the desire to (re)capture success. DavidCameron’s main message to the Conservative Party during his leadershipcampaign was that simply sticking to its guns and waiting for Labour to failwould not be enough: the Tories had to change to win. Once elected, heproceeded, albeit in a rather more circumscribed manner than is oftensuggested, to try to signal to the electorate that such change was indeed takingplace, initiating policy reviews, forays onto traditional Labour and Lib Demterritory, and mechanisms to ensure a spread of candidates who looked rathermore like those who might one day elect them. The results — at least asmeasured by opinion polls, wherein the Tories only once touched 40% (in theearly spring of 2007) only to fall precipitously in the wake of ‘Grammarsgate’and the ‘Brown bounce’ — were not, for the first 20 months anyway,spectacular.

There were successes, but these were heavily qualified. In the dog days of theBlair premiership, the Tories began to match and even establish a narrow leadover a Labour government preoccupied with its own leadership succession.

Table 1 Change, credibility — and confusion?

True False Do not

know

Under David Cameron the Conservatives have acquired a new freshness

and vitality

53 29 18

The Conservatives under David Cameron are more moderate than they

used to be under Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith

41 21 38

The Conservatives under David Cameron have greatly improved their

chances of winning the next election

53 23 24

A Conservative government under David Cameron might not be better

than the present Labour Government but at least it would not be worse

43 34 23

It is hard to know what the Conservative Party under David Cameron

stands for at the moment

56 23 21

It is hard to know what a Conservative government under David Cameron

would actually be like

67 17 16

Source: YouGov, fieldwork conducted 25–27 February 2008.


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Encouraging signs that this might be converted into electoral success, as wasthe case in impressive local election performances in both 2006 and 2007, weregiven the lie, however, in poor showings in by-elections in Bromley andChislehurst and especially in Ealing Southall. Likewise, as Table 2 shows, whilepolls suggested that most people (especially at the top end of the socio-economic ladder) recognized Cameron was trying to change his party, they alsoindicated some scepticism about the extent of his commitment and success —at least on the eve of the ‘rebalancing’ of policy and tone in the wake of theBrown bounce that some were labelling the ‘lurch to the right’.

Just as frustratingly for Conservative strategists, polls conducted mid-waythrough 2007 — that is before the rebalancing (or, if one prefers, the ‘lurch tothe right’) discussed above — indicated that the Conservative Party wasconsidered to be some way to the right of its leader (see Table 3), which may inpart explain why the same poll found that 52% of voters thought Cameron was‘not in control of his party’ (in marked contrast to Brown, whom 62% believedwas in control of his). If the strategy really was ‘decontamination’ then it wasincomplete by the late summer/early autumn of 2007. The evidence suggeststhat the Party had some way to go before it could begin — as the strategyapparently always envisaged — to re-introduce a little more red-meat back intoits diet: more bunnies needed hugging before any were boiled.

The Conservative Party, then, at least prior to the Brown bounce, appearedto be winning increased support but without convincing many people that ithad moved to the centre. In the wake of that bounce, and the evident disquietamong some supporters, Cameron and his lieutenants made the decision toplay more to their party’s traditional strengths: hugging was by no meanstotally out of the question but boiling was definitely back on the agenda.However, rather than such a shift of emphasis proving useless or evencounterproductive, as arguably it did for their predecessors, they have seentheir party not only re-establish its lead over Labour but extend it to a levelthose predecessors dared not even dream about — a level that could even putthe Conservatives on course to win an overall majority at the next generalelection. This would seem to suggest that the extent of change necessary tofacilitate, if not actually produce, electoral success may well be more modestthan modernizers — particularly ‘uber-modernizers’ — have argued.

That the improvement in Conservative fortunes occurred just as the Partyappeared to be reverting to type rather than (or at least as well as) branchingout also suggests — rather prosaically but, to many old hands, ratherpredictably — that opposition party success has much less to do with its ownefforts and much more to do with the problems of the party in power (Ball,2003). Prime Minister Brown’s apparent loss of nerve over calling an earlyelection, compounded by his farcical refusal to acknowledge that the opinionpolls had influenced his decision, along with a series of unfortunate events


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Table 2 A changed party under Cameron?

Thinking about what you have noticed the Conservative Party saying and doing in recent months, please say which of the following statements is

closest to your view, even if none of the statements is exactly your view.

All

(%)

Men

(%)

Women

(%)

AB

(%)

C1

(%)

C2

(%)

DE

(%)

18–34

(%)

35–54

(%)

55+

(%)

Con

(%)

Lab

(%)

LD

(%)

David Cameron started off by trying

to change the Conservative Party

and bring it closer to the centre

ground of politics, but recently he

seems to have moved back to the

right.

30 30 31 39 28 28 24 34 29 27 29 37 34

David Cameron has tried to change

the Conservative Party and seems to

be sticking to that strategy.

38 38 38 40 36 41 36 37 35 42 45 39 37

David Cameron has never really

seemed to be trying to change the

Conservative Party and bring it

closer to the centre ground of

politics.

25 26 24 14 30 22 32 23 26 25 23 20 26

Source: Populus Ltd., fieldwork 31 August–2 September 2007. Tim

Bale

Qualify

ingConserv

ativ

eParty

Changeunder

David

Camero

n

289

British

Politics

2008

3

(a run on a bank, the loss of millions of citizens’ financial and identity recordsby government agencies, more miscalculations of immigration numbers anda funding scandal) conspired to make his government look sleazy, indecisiveand incompetent. Meanwhile, the other ‘opposition’ party — the LiberalDemocrats — were in disarray having deposed their leader. Clearly, theConservatives had to have gone some way to convincing the public that theywere an electable alternative in order to benefit from the mess Labour and theLib Dems had got themselves into, but the polling and other evidence suggeststhat the process was not that well advanced. This in turn suggests that it wasthe Labour (and Lib Dem) mess, rather than the Conservative message, thatreally mattered.

Some Conservatives, we have already suggested, will reply that, no, thedifference was made by their message — or rather their change of messageaway from modernization and toward the traditional Tory themes thatplayed during and in the run-up to their Blackpool Conference in the earlyautumn of 2007. Certainly, George Osborne’s canny conference announcementthat only ‘millionaires’ would pay ‘death taxes’ and that the changewould be financed by a new levy on the ‘non-dom’ super-rich who live in theUK but normally pay (and in most cases avoid) tax outside the country wentdown very well with most people — many of whom were simultaneously

Table 3 Left–right placement: leaders, parties and electorate

Yourself

Gordon

Brown

Labour

party

David

Cameron

Conservative

party

Liberal

democrats

All Lab

voters

Con

voters

Lib Dem

voters

Very left-wing 4 4 1 1 4 2 5 1 2

Fairly left-wing 16 16 2 2 8 9 17 1 11

Slightly left-of-

centre

26 24 5 4 16 16 30 3 19

Centre 15 17 16 9 29 26 26 19 39

Slightly right-of-

centre

8 9 29 18 8 12 5 31 6

Fairly right-wing 3 3 16 27 1 7 1 20 3

Very right-wing 1 1 4 13 0 3 0 6 1

Do not know 28 26 28 27 34 26 16 19 21

Average �25 �22 28 46 �16 �3 �28 33 �13

Some people talk about ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘centre’ to describe parties and politicians. Where would

you place the followingy?

Average is calculated by counting ‘very left-wing’ as �100, ‘fairly left-wing’ as �67, ‘slightly left-of-centre’ as �33, ‘centre’ as 0, ‘slightly right-of-centre as +33, ‘fairly right-wing’ as +67 and ‘very

right-wing’ as +100.

Source: YouGov, fieldwork 23–25 July 2007.


290


Table 4 Which party would best handle which problem?

Party best at handlingy Lab Con Lab lead Change 2005–08

(%) (%) (%) Lab Con

National Health Service May 2005 36 23 13

May 2006 26 24 2

August 2007 32 23 9

January 2008 25 25 0 �11 +2

Education and schools May 2005 32 25 7

May 2006 24 27 �3August 2007 34 25 9

January 2008 25 28 �3 �7 +3

Childcare, support for families May 2005 43 14 29

May 2006 33 18 15

August 2007 38 17 21

January 2008 31 20 11 �12 +6

Housing May 2005 33 19 14

May 2006 25 21 4

August 2007 28 18 10

January 2008 25 22 3 �8 +3

Pensions May 2005 25 24 1

May 2006 20 23 �3August 2007 23 22 1

January 2008 21 24 �3 �4 0

Unemployment May 2005 44 19 25

May 2006 31 21 10

August 2007 35 19 16

January 2008 28 25 3 �16 +6

The economy overall May 2005 46 24 22

May 2006 31 29 2

August 2007 35 24 11

January 2008 28 30 �2 �18 +6

Economic growth May 2005 44 24 20

May 2006 30 29 1

August 2007 35 24 11

January 2008 27 30 �3 �17 +6

Inflation and prices May 2005 43 22 21

May 2006 31 25 6

August 2007 34 23 11

January 2008 27 27 0 �16 +5


291


impressed with Osborne’s plans to cut stamp duty for first time buyersand disgusted with Brown’s embarrassingly inept attempt to prevent theTories having a good week by flying out to Iraq and announcing (as it turnedout, not altogether accurately) troop withdrawals. Again, though, we shouldnote that polling prior to that announcement, and to the rebalancing ingeneral — did not depict a public crying out for more right-wing policies —one that duly proceeded to reward the Conservatives once they produced them.We can no more show a clear correlation between rising Conservative fortunesand the pursuit of a more traditional (tax-cutting, tough on crime andimmigration, family-friendly) agenda than we can between the slightlyless impressive opinion poll improvement and the circumscribed centrismthat preceded it.

What we can show, however, is that in large measure the Party continues tobe most strongly identified with those issues it traditionally owns rather than

Table 4 (continued )

Party best at handlingy Lab Con Lab lead Change 2005–08

(%) (%) (%) Lab Con

Interest rates May 2005 43 22 21

May 2006 32 25 7

August 2007 34 22 12

January 2008 26 26 0 �17 +4

Environment, global warming May 2005 19 11 8

May 2006 14 16 �2August 2007 19 15 4

January 2008 18 17 1 �1 +6

Terrorists and the war on terror May 2005 30 28 2

May 2006 20 26 �6August 2007 23 24 �1January 2008 22 27 �5 �8 �1

Law and order May 2005 27 38 �11May 2006 18 38 �20August 2007 24 34 �10January 2008 18 37 �19 �9 �1

Asylum and immigration May 2005 19 42 �23May 2006 12 34 �22August 2007 17 34 �17January 2008 13 37 �24 �6 �5

Source: YouGov, 28 January 2008.


292


with those to which David Cameron had spent time trying to stake a claim.This is not to say that it has not improved its position (and helped erode thegovernment’s lead) on traditional Labour issues. But it is noticeable that thisimprovement (and this erosion) would appear to owe more to an overall loss ofconfidence in Labour (after a temporary rally after Blair’s departure) than to awidespread re-evaluation of the Conservatives, who have also, incidentally,seen their reputation on their core issues dented, if only slightly. Table 4 givesthe details, and highlights in bold the one area — the environment and globalwarming — where the rise in number of people picking the Tories as best ableto handle the issue is bigger than the fall in the number picking Labour.

Table 4 suggests that the two parties’ underlying brand strengths andweaknesses remain largely, if not wholly intact. In a nutshell, althoughLabour has clearly suffered on the economy, voters still look to it for whatAmerican pollsters sometimes call the ‘mommy issues’ and to the Tories forwhat they call the ‘daddy’ issues. The fact that the Tory advantage on Europeremains illusory, incidentally, probably explains why the leadership continues,quite wisely some would say, not to make as much of it as some of itssupporters (particularly in the media) would like (see Bale, 2006b). Thissuperficial picture would seem to be confirmed when voters are asked questionsthat tap not into how well they think parties handle issues (which willinevitably be affected by evanescent events) but into their underlying brandimages. As Table 5 suggests, the latter are still very sticky, which means MrCameron was right to counsel his Party at its 2008 Spring Forum that it stillhad a long way to go.

Conclusion

If it was ever true — and it probably was not — that, as right-wing columnistMelanie Philips suggested in her Daily Mail column on 3 September 2007,David Cameron intended ‘to reposition the Tories as the party of spliff-friendly

Table 5 Underlying brand perceptions

Which party is? Lab Con Lib. None Lab lead

The party that is more committed to state education 46 20 9 17 26

The party of the NHS 42 21 7 21 21

The party of fairness 26 17 20 26 9

The party of sound economic management 31 26 6 21 5

The party of lower taxes 20 35 10 24 �15The party that is tougher on law and order 23 41 4 24 �18

Source: Populus Ltd., fieldwork conducted 4–6 January 2008.


293


hoodie huggers whose hearts bled green and gay’, those days are over. Thesame goes for Dorey’s assertion (2007: 152) that ‘in spite ofyhostility orindifference among the Party’s grass-roots, and for all the criticisms expressedby some prominent Conservatives about the direction and speed of change,Cameron has evinced no signs of being deflected from his modernizingcrusade’. Making fun of ‘Bottler Brown’s’ decision not to go to the polls early,the Conservatives released a poster on the day that many commentators hadpencilled in as election day.10 It purported to show policies that voters wouldmiss out on having been denied their chance to elect a Tory government. Of thenine, two could be said to point toward a more centrist strategy: ‘stoppingNHS cuts’ and ‘taxing pollution, not families’. The other eight were testamentto the party’s rebalancing act: ‘abolition of stamp duty for nine out of ten firsttime buyers’, ‘abolition of inheritance tax for everyone except millionaires’,‘teaching by ability and more discipline in schools’, ‘National CitizenService for every school leaver’, ‘proper immigration controls and a newBorder Police Force’, ‘a vote on the European Constitution’ and ‘ending theearly release of prisoners’.

‘Team Cameron’ appears to have made a strategic calculation that theConservative leader has done just about enough on the change front. Peopleare at least willing to listen to the Tories and many are sympathetic to theirtraditional hard-line stances on immigration, crime and (if it is not pushed toofar and does not cause internal disputes) Europe. Meanwhile the so-called ‘andtheory’ of Conservatism suggests, if Mr Cameron can combine tough andtender messages (for example, tougher sentencing combined with measures to‘strengthen families’ and tackle Britain’s supposedly ‘broken society’), thatthese issues need not necessarily crowd out more ‘centrist’ policies on bread-and-butter issues. Moreover — and particularly now he seems to have wonback the support of the traditional Tory press — it may indeed be possible forthe Conservatives to make the election about these issues rather than those onwhich Labour has sizeable leads in a way that it was not under Hague orHoward. As Ashcroft’s Smell the Coffee made clear, it was not so much thatpeople disagreed with the Party’s policies on law and order and immigrationper se, it was that they rejected them once they knew they came from theConservatives; perhaps David Cameron is perceived as so much nicer than hispredecessors that, coming from him, the argument runs, the policies will notsound so nasty. In any case, the argument continues, the impact of a globalcredit crunch feeding into the real economy, and the inevitable mishapssuffered by every government, will make it clearer than ever that, at last, thecountry needs a Conservative government, irrespective of how much the partyhas really changed. Pressing change much further, particularly on the policyfront, would — as some of his internal critics suggest — be to sell theideological pass quite unnecessarily. David Cameron may be no ‘headbanger’


294


(to use one of Ken Clarke’s favourite phrases) but is most assuredly aConservative — in a way that Tony Blair perhaps was never altogether ‘aLabour man’. There is no reason to suppose he would want to give up morethan he has to in order to win office.

It is of course possible that Cameron wants (or at least wanted) to do moreto change his party but that discretion proved in the end to be the better part ofvalour. He has not encountered much internal opposition but that is because,for all the talk, he has not really pushed things very far. When he (or at leastone of his most modernizing lieutenants) did so — over grammar schools —the result was far from encouraging. There is, in fact, only so much a partyleader (even one so constitutionally unconstrained as the leader of theConservative Party) can do before the returns begin to diminish and the costsmount. And as we have seen, the party change literature stresses again andagain the inertia to which parties are prone: levers can be pulled and buttonspressed on the bridge, but that does not guarantee that the boys in the engineroom or on the top deck can or will deliver.

As that literature also observes, there is no simple causal relationshipbetween what the leader does to change a party and the party’s support in thewake of such changes. Nor, it notes (as do Dorey and Denham and O’Hara) ischange necessarily going to work, or make things better; indeed, it may evenmake things worse (Harmel and Janda, 1994, 275–276). Moreover, asHarmel and Janda also stress (ibid.: 278 and 279), once a dominant coalitionbegins to bed down, it will be less inclined to promote change unless it can besure it will preserve or consolidate its power. The grammar schools rowsuggests that sitting tight, especially since the party has regained its lead in theopinion polls, may well be the safest option. Likewise, while it was probablysmart in an era of valence rather than position politics (see Green, 2007) forthe leadership, in March 2008, to make a virtue of not rushing into‘unaffordable’ tax cuts, it acted swiftly to reassure the Party’s membershipand its media supporters that cuts were by no means off the agenda altogether.The leadership might like to go further towards the electorate and away fromthe party but the best, as Voltaire observed, can sometimes be the enemyof the good.

Eighteenth century epigrams are all very well but perhaps a morecontemporary analogy serves to make our point even more clearly.11 Anyonefaced with selling their house — if it is, like most houses, of a certain age andtherefore less than perfect — essentially has three options. The first is toundertake extensive and impressive renovations. The second, if they areworried that the time, effort and money will not help them get a higher price, isto put the clutter into storage, steam-clean the carpets, paint over any cracks,place fresh flowers in every room, put on a soothing CD and a piping hot potof coffee, and hope for the best. The third option is to do a bit of both — fix up


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the one or two rooms that experts suggest really do make a difference butotherwise rely on a combination of creating the right ambiance and the factthat most people who turn up to take a look round probably see some basicmerit in the house in the first place.

Leaders seeking to sell their parties are in a similar position. Only rarelycan they, or do they, take the first option. The second option is easier butnot without risk: voters, we have already noted, are not fools and a surfeit ofsuperficial change can provoke as much suspicion and confusion asadmiration, especially when the media is as obsessed as it is at presentwith exposing spin and subterfuge. The third option is probably the mostcommon, namely to do as little as you can get away with and as much asyou can afford. David Cameron and the group of advisers he has aroundhim had the wit to see this. They undertook some serious but focusedrenovation, even if they were unable to do as much as they had hopedfor fear of aggravating problems that were too expensive and time consumingto fix. But they also realized that not all aspects of the old place werenegatives, especially since it was obvious that they had made an effort togenerally tidy up.

Ultimately, however, as all home-owners know, especially now, the pricethey can command probably depends less on their own efforts and more on themarket they are selling into. David Cameron may not have changed his Partyquite as much as some suggest but he does appear to have done enough toensure that, at long last, it is seen as a credible contender. And he and hiscolleagues have done a lot, since Gordon Brown took over, to help create theimpression of a Labour government that has run out of steam, failed to deliveron its promises and forgotten how to manage an increasingly shaky economycompetently. Ultimately, however, it is on this impression, rather than on theirown image makeover, that the Tories’ electoral fortunes may depend.‘Governments lose elections; oppositions don’t win them’ may well be triteand not entirely true: after all, a challenger facing even the most hopelessincumbent still has to convince voters that it stands at least a chance of doingbetter. Similarly, even as belts tighten and the good times look like they mightbe over, it is never simply ‘the economy, stupid’. But both phrases, hackneyedthough they may be, contain enough essential wisdom to make them worthremembering — especially for those of us so bound up with studying agentsthat we risk forgetting that they are seldom as powerful as the conditions theyhelp to create but can never, of course, control.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by theLeverhulme Trust for the research and writing of this article.


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Notes

1 The plan, announced in December 2005, was for target and Conservative held seats where an

MP was retiring, to pick candidates from a centrally approved list containing 50% women and

‘a significant proportion of people with disabilities, and from black and minority ethnic

communities’. In August 2006, Cameron announced that from then on the seats would have to

ensure that of four prospective candidates voted on, two would be women. For a general

discussion of the Conservatives and female representation, see Campbell et al. (2006).

2 Theresa May, Party Chairwoman under Iain Duncan Smith warned the Tory faithful that they

were still seen as ‘the nasty party’ — an epithet that ever since has been used by their enemies.

The full text of her speech can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/oct/07/

conservatives2002.conservatives1.

3 Both the Mail and the Telegraph were, thoughout the latter part of 2006 and the first

9 months of 2007, reported to have warmed to Gordon Brown and cooled on Mr Cameron.

Examples of pieces that had alarm bells ringing include ‘Brown offers Britain a moral compass’,

Daily Mail, 26 September 2006 and ‘Brown targets Tory heartlands’, Daily Telegraph, 25

September, 2007. For a discussion, see ‘No longer The Torygraph?’, Comment is Free

(Guardian), http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tim_montgomerie/2007/05/no_longer_the_

torygraph.html.

4 The six Policy Groups’ reports can be found by clicking through from http://www.conservatives.

com/tile.do?def=standup.speakup.page.

5 A useful primer to the concern expressed in Tory newspapers about the electoral and

philosophical dangers of Blueprint for a Green Economy can be found in ‘All so predictable’,

ConservativeHome, 14 September 2007.

6 Many of those working for Hague were convinced that there was an organized faction within

Central Office dedicated to seeing their hero, Michael Portillo, snatch the leadership from

Hague.

7 The verbal construction ‘to bang on about’ has passed into common usage in today’s

Conservative Party and is to imply that an opponent’s concern is self-evidently obsessive and

old fashioned.

8 For the hares vs tortoises debate, see ‘David Cameron and the coping classes’, Telegraph,

31 January 2008.

9 For examples of media criticism over the issue, ‘Why the Tories may pay for ruling out tax cuts

despite their lead in opinion poll’, Daily Mail, 17 March 2008 and ‘Tory tax policy alienates

traditional supporters’, Telegraph, 18 March 2008. For members’ attitudes, see http://

conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2008/03/what-tory-membe.html.

10 The poster can be viewed at http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2007/10/tory-poster-

to-.html.

11 Thanks to Philip Cowley for refining my thinking on this—and other parts—of this article.

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