A Pall Mall club: the members’ table at lunchtime: unease and discontent. Everyone wants rid of Gordon Brown. No one is sure about David Cameron. I am asked the questions that I have been asked a hundred times before. What does he believe in? Will he be up to it?
The questioners think that their doubts arise from a shortage of policies. They are wrong. The problem is caused by an absence of conviction. After all, the Lib Dems have policies on everything from asparagus beds to xylophone-playing. Little good it does them, because few people believe that they stand for anything.
No one thought that about Margaret Thatcher. Yet in 1978/79, Tory policy-making was at roughly the same level as it is now. There was a crucial difference. Like her or loathe her — there was rarely a middle way — voters felt that her opinions rested upon a rock of conviction. Not many people say that about the Tories today.
There is a graver problem. Public dismay about the state of the country extends well beyond Pall Mall. There is a widespread desire for strong government. In Conservative circles, there is a longing for another Tory revolutionary: a second Margaret Thatcher, who could force through the necessary changes and restore our pride in our country. Even many people who intend to vote Tory wonder whether Mr Cameron has the firmness of purpose required.
One man is to blame for this anxious agnosticism: David Cameron. Up to now, there has been a problem with his rhetoric and his tone of voice. Although he has been eloquent about change and modernisation, he has yet to hit the deeper notes. He has yet to expound his political convictions.
This does not mean that they are lacking, though they are based on practicalities, not on abstractions. David Cameron has a powerful, clarifying mind and much more intellectual self-confidence than Margaret Thatcher had. At Oxford, he took a First without being a slave to his books. When he was a political adviser at the Treasury, he was good at explaining economic complexities. But he has little interest in intellectualism and prefers problem-solving to theorising. In 2005, he was in charge of drafting the Tories’ election manifesto. There were complaints that it was insufficiently philosophical. Mr Cameron was dismissive: ‘If people want philosophy, they should read Descartes.’
Since then, the mood has changed. In these perilous times, the public wants echoes of Martin Luther: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ For Tories, this is hard. While not quite an oxymoron, Tory philosophy is a slalom-ride between paradoxes and contradictions. Socialists believe in reshaping history to remake mankind, and even the post-socialist left retains some teleological momentum. Tories have no such means of evading the complexities of life in an imperfect world. Tory philosophy can never be more than a distillation of history and experience: an unending dialectic between principles and circumstances. Mr Cameron must find another route to conviction.
But he has the raw material for a Tory distillation: he has read plenty of history and has a lot of experience. Without ever being a one-dimensional politician, he has spent much of the past 20 years talking, thinking and practising politics. Like most Tories who came to political consciousness in the 1980s, he takes Euroscepticism and Thatcherite economics for granted. Like many Tories of his generation, he is a social liberal with no nostalgia for the era when it was commonplace to argue for the repatriation of coloured immigrants while keeping women in the kitchen and homosexuals in the closet.
Most bright young Tories share those views. But from 2001 onwards, David Cameron underwent a political quickening which was to lead him and his party into new territory and which entitles him to be called a Tory revolutionary. The change was a response to heavy defeats and the threat of annihilation. By the early 2000s, David Cameron and his friends were not just fed up with losing to Tony Blair. They were alarmed by the prospect of indefinite exile in the electoral desert. As they analysed the problem, they realised that it had deep roots.
Despite three successive leaders from modest backgrounds, the Tories were still widely seen as the party for spoiled rich so-and-sos: people who never had to worry about the bills or about conditions in the local schools and hospitals — they would never use them. This explained the Tories’ failure to progress as the middle class expanded. As long as the lower middle classes’ fear of socialism outweighed their social chippiness, the Tories could still win elections. Then came Tony Blair.
He decontaminated his brand. David Cameron and his friends realised that they had to do likewise, and that they ought to start with the most misleading phrase in modern British political history: Tory cuts. This did not mean that the Cameroons were social democrats, unless the same was true of Margaret Thatcher — because there had never been any Tory cuts. She too ensured that public expenditure would share in the proceeds of growth.
Yet Mrs Thatcher was a problem, for two reasons. First, her body language was all wrong. It gave the impression of revelling in cuts, although there were none. In Chris Patten’s words, even while she was running a blood-transfusion service, she would sound like Countess Dracula. Second, Thatcherism had no theory of the state. She never sat down with a blank piece of intellect and asked the basic question: ‘If the British government were to be established tomorrow, ex nihilo, what functions and powers should it have? What should it own; how much should it spend?’ Although she had other matters to distract her, that basic intellectual weakness helps to explain her failure to reform the public services.
David Cameron has been remarkably successful in solving the body-language problem. It is a source of ironic amusement that an Old Etonian should have turned the Tories into the party of the public services; this is an electoral revolution. It was vital that the voters should have confidence in the Tories’ commitment to state-funded education and the NHS. As Oliver Letwin puts it, that earns them the permission to be radical.
Such permission is needed to deal with a government machine which is out of control. Tories have always believed that it falls to them to solve the greatest problems of the age. The trade unions undermined Britain’s postwar recovery. They disrupted the first Wilson government, broke Ted Heath and brought down Jim Callaghan. In 1979, Britain seemed to be ungovernable. Mrs Thatcher governed.
For trade unions, now read public services. There are two challenges. The first is to ensure that they serve the public, not themselves. The second is to ensure that a pound spent by the government on a taxpayer’s behalf earns the same value for money as he could obtain for himself.
Those are revolutionary tasks. But four years ago, David Cameron had no intention of tackling them in a revolutionary manner. In those lost, innocent days, the task that he saw before him was utterly different to the present prospect. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, whose words were often less cautious than her deeds, he believed in suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. He thought that a Tory revolution in government would be more palatable to the voters if it were introduced gradually.
Mr Cameron always intended to start with schools. For 30 years, since Keith Joseph’s time, Tories have dreamt about introducing education vouchers. During most of those years, it seemed more of a fantasy than a dream. But the Swedish model, which makes it easy to set up new schools, could be the way to end state control of publicly funded education. It could als o be popular radicalism. In other areas, Mr Cameron expected to be more cautious. Sharing the proceeds of growth would facilitate a gradual introduction of market mechanisms. Like almost everyone else, he was unaware that his underlying assumption was wildly incautious, and that there would be no growth to share.
The deficit has to be dealt with, which must involve sizeable cuts in public expenditure. Around 10 per cent over three years would be the minimum requirement, but that would mean an almighty battle. Pay freezes, job cuts, conflict with the public sector unions: all are unavoidable. This makes it vital to achieve a Tory revolution in government; cuts are not enough. After those cuts, the state would still be spending more than £10,000 a year for every man, woman and child in the country. For all that money, the taxpayer is entitled to a bit more than blood, sweat, toil and tears. Even in straitened times, there has to be a vista of sunlit uplands. To cut intelligently, it would be necessary to implement radical reforms which can be sold as Tory improvements: to convince the public that a leaner, less wasteful government would also be a more efficient and more responsive government.
Mr Cameron will be faced with another problem that has defeated successive governments: Europe. Despite their Euro-scepticism, the Cameroons had hoped to avoid another fight with the EU. If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, they had better start limbering up. The Brown government has lied and broken its word. Even if everyone else signed up to Lisbon, it would have no moral standing in this country. So what would the Tory leader do? Between now and the election, he will have to tell us.
An incoming government will be faced by some of the greatest challenges in peacetime history, especially as David Cameron intends to add to them by addressing the broken society and the environment. So is he tough enough? He has many of the sinews of toughness: a clear and incisive brain, physical stamina, an easy habit of command; he does not find it hard to give orders. He is happy in his own skin and fortunate in his wife. In establishing a reputation for toughness, he has one obstacle: that four-letter word, Eton. A dismaying number of people who ought to know better cling to the notion that all Etonians are wimps. Three of the last four commanders of the SAS had been at Eton. The fourth narrowly defeated an OE. It is true that Eton was founded by a wimp, Henry VI, as a college for poor scholars. The poverty and the wimpishness both died out around the end of the Middle Ages.
David Cameron also knows how to speak, which takes us back to the beginning. From now on, he ought to reach into his soul for the big language, the resonant words, to convince the doubters that he understands the problems and will hammer out the solutions. If he can do that, he will be able to deploy a further asset: his charm. It is a paradox, but this Old Etonian may find it easier than Margaret Thatcher did to persuade the public that he is on their side.
Faced by a crisis, a statesman turns it into an opportunity. So a fiscal emergency becomes a method of achieving better government. Mr Cameron is not yet a statesman, but if he wants to be a successful prime minister, he will have to become one. These are not times which admit the luxury of a mediocre premiership. The current crisis will enforce a revolutionary agenda. So is he Kerensky, or Lenin? Within ten years, will people be comparing him to Margaret Thatcher, or to Gordon Brown? His destiny is greatness, or failure. That provides grounds for cautious optimism, for David Cameron is under no illusions. He knows what he is taking on. He does not intend to fail.