Fight or flight

David Cameron now has the chance to be the Prime Minister he always wanted to be. Up to now, his premiership has, to his frustration, been dominated by the economic crisis that the country is facing. His cherished social reform agenda has not been the government’s animating mission but a rhetorical extra. But after last week’s riots, this has all changed. Broke Britain is now being forced to share its space at the top of the national agenda with Cameron’s specialist subject, Broken Britain.

This crisis may have deprived Cameron of his summer holiday but it has given him back his political mission. Those present at the meeting in Downing Street before Cameron addressed parliament last Thursday say the mood was remarkably upbeat. There was no resentment about being dragged back from their villas to their desks; no angst or panicking about a country in chaos. Instead, there was a confidence that the Prime Minister was playing on his home turf.

To believers, it is as if David Cameron’s whole career to date has been preparation for this moment. They boast that his warnings about the broken society have been vindicated and that now is the chance for him to show that the ‘big society’ really is the answer to the problems he identified several years ago. They happily admit that Cameron feels far more at home with this subject than the deficit — now he is talking about what he really cares about, they say.

Conservative ministers feel the same way. They are struggling to keep a note of excitement out of their voices, aware that it would be unseemly to appear pleased at the political moment that the riots and their aftermath have created. They believe that they have been presented with an opportunity to move the country decisively to the right, to brush aside the obstacles that have so frustrated their reform agenda. As one minister puts it, the riots ‘give power to our elbow to bloody well get on with it’.

And yes, it has been striking how much more intensity and conviction there is in our Prime Minister’s voice and body language when he talks about ‘broken Britain’, and it’s true that the crisis the country is facing has energised rather than demoralised Downing Street. But the big question that remains is this: has Cameron got what it takes to seize the day? He has just these few short weeks in the aftermath of the riots to push through the necessary reforms, with the country behind him. But does he have the gumption?

Worringly, Cameron’s response so far has consisted more of words than action. And every day of inaction is a day on which the forces opposed to his agenda gather strength. He risks being another Tony Blair, a prime minister who talked a great game when the nation was listening but proved unable to follow through. If the Prime Minister doesn’t grasp this soon, he will be in danger of losing his social purpose almost as quickly as he regained it.

There are already signs that Cameron may delay striking until the iron has cooled. There is talk of the policy response to the riots being unveiled at Tory party conference in October. This is too late. At the moment, Cameron holds the conch: he is the Prime Minister of a nation that is looking for answers. But by the Conservative party conference, he’ll just be the third party leader to have devoted his speech to talking about how best to deal with the problems revealed by those nights of looting back in August.

Voices of caution inside No. 10 are already warning against ‘fighting on too many fronts at once’. But as one exasperated reformer says, this has things backwards. This is a moment for ‘shock and awe’, for Cameron to announce a whole set of measures and dare his opponents to stand in his way.

The longer that Cameron delays his policy solutions, the more the urgency will drain from the situation. Public opinion will begin to drift back to where it was before the riots and the opportunity for radical progress will have been wasted.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Prime Minister’s caution is that he knows what needs to be done. His speech on Monday about the ‘slow-motion moral collapse’ that has taken place over the past few decades was an acute diagnosis of what has gone wrong with British society. It would have been a brilliant speech by a leader of the opposition. But it fell short as a prime ministerial speech because the policy responses he presented failed to match his rhetoric.

Cameron declared that we have to show those rioters who were convinced that they wouldn’t get a prison sentence as the jails were full ‘that the party’s over’. But that’s hard to do when the government is determined to reduce the number of prison places by more than 2,000, regardless of how many people deserve to be locked up.

The Prime Minister also conceded that his government’s work on reforming the Human Rights Act was proving to be ‘frustratingly slow’. Progress on this issue is, of course, being held up by the Liberal Democrats, who remain unthinkingly in favour of the Act.

There will be no better moment for Cameron to override the concerns of his coalition partners. As one minister observes, ‘this is a uniquely weak moment for them to stand up to us on this.’ The Liberal Democrats, still bruised from the battering they received over tuition fees, would have been hesitant to emerge as the party standing in the way of what needed to be done to deal with the looters.

But this chance is being missed. Cameron is still talking the language of reviews rather than action. The Liberal Democrats see that, and are confident that they can block this and the other great coalition social policy divide, family policy. They think that if they can hold out until Cameron goes off on holiday again later in the month without conceding anything big, politics will have returned to normal by the time he comes back.

Liberal Democrats are not, though, the most serious obstacles to the Tory reform agenda. They are, after all, only politicians. The real professionals when it comes to thwarting a prime minister’s will are the ‘opposition in residence’, the civil service and the public-sector lobby groups.

Consider how the Home Office bureaucracy and the police have scuppered No. 10’s plan to bring in the American Bill Bratton as the next commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Bratton, the free world’s most successful policeman, was clearly a strong candidate for the post, having cut crime as police chief in both New York and Los Angeles. He had indicated to No. 10 that he would be very keen to do the job and had the enthusiastic support of Hilton and the Prime Minister.

But senior police officers didn’t want Bratton to be allowed to apply for the role. They wanted to keep their monopoly on the top jobs in the force and didn’t want the kind of change that a total outsider would have brought to the Met. One imagines that Londoners who watched the police stand by while their streets were trashed would take the view that change was precisely what the force needed.

The Home Office duly ensured that Bratton was barred from the process. It stipulated in the job advert that all applicants had to be British. The Home Secretary acquiesced in this decision. Allies of Theresa May complain that ‘people like Steve Hilton think that the government should do what it wants to do’. But why on earth shouldn’t a government do what it wants to do? It is a sign of how house-trained some Conservatives have become that they find the idea of the government running the country both offensive and absurd.

To the frustration of many in No. 10, Cameron simply accepted Theresa May’s parroting of her department’s line, rather than making her reconsider. As one colleague of his says wearily, ‘He has a blind spot. He won’t face Theresa down when she digs her kitten heels in.’

But Cameron’s approach over this matter is typical of his approach to all departmental obstructionism. Rather than riding roughshod over it, as Thatcher would have done, he simply accepts it. Worryingly, he is not alone. I know of one Cabinet member who estimates that only four of his 22 colleagues actually lead their departments; the rest just represent the views of their officials to Cabinet and the Prime Minister.

Too often, Cameron acts like a detached chairman of the board rather than a hands-on chief executive. This problem is compounded by the fact that, as one close Cameron ally bemoans, the Prime Minister ‘still imagines that if you give clear orders, changes will be made’. He hasn’t woken up to the ability of the bureaucracy to simply sit on instructions, even prime ministerial ones.

One No. 10 source, in language that Sir Humphrey would be proud of, says that they didn’t push on Bratton because ‘if you try to take the biggest step first you can come undone’. It’s a classic example of the logic which mandarins use to suffocate attempts at radical reform.

There is an excessive reverence for the civil service inside No. 10. One minister complains that Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s trusted chief of staff, spends far more time telling ministers what they can’t do rather than telling officials what they must do. Cameron could, for example, have taken control of the government’s agenda by filling the policy unit at No. 10 with political appointees, committed to his vision of Britain. Instead, he has allowed Jeremy Heywood, Downing Street’s ambitious permanent secretary, to staff it with civil servants and management consultants whose primary loyalty is to the interests of the permanent bureaucracy.

Between now and the return of parliament next month, Cameron faces a decision. He can either use this time to try and free himself of the constraints that the politics of coalition and the bureaucratic machine have imposed on him. Or he can continue at the current pace, which will give him little chance of fixing the social problems that have been so painfully exposed by the events of last week.

If he is prepared to take the risk of overriding his coalition partners’ objections to reform of the human rights act and a pro-marriage family policy, and to be relentless in pushing his welfare, education and police reform agenda through the system, then he will have provided the tools needed to repair Britain’s social fabric. But if by next summer it is still business as usual, then we will know that Cameron is not fit for the fight.