The Nick Clegg bubble has been caused by the mistaken view that he is not a machine politician, says James Forsyth. But if this bubble doesn’t burst before polling day, then it could be the end of the Tory party as we know it
Both Andy Coulson and the gaggle of journalists surrounding him agreed that there had been ‘no game-changer’ in the first leaders’ debate. As the Tory communications chief, it’s his job to be optimistic — but this was not spin. He believed it. And so did most of the Westminster insiders, who gave the debate to Clegg on points but thought there was no moment in the 90 minutes that was going to transform the campaign. Even in the bar afterwards, if anyone had suggested that Clegg’s party would soon be leading in the polls, their drink would have been taken away and a taxi called.
How wrong we were. Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats surged in the polls in the coming days; the rest threatens to be history. What we had all underestimated was the evidence under our noses, that the single biggest force in British politics right now is anti-politics. And this amorphous movement had found a hero that night in Mr Clegg. Not because he was an inspiring figure, but because voting for him seemed to the most effective way of bringing down the whole Westminster system — which is why warning that a vote for Clegg will result in chaos is a self-defeating strategy.
If anti-politics is to win the coming general election, then it will be fairly easy to chart its rise. The ‘others’ mentioned in the opinion polls have been steadily making headway over the years while the two main parties lost 7.3 million votes between 1992 and 2005. The sense of alimentations and distrust has massively increased because of the MPs’ expenses scandal — and the economic crisis, which exposed our politicians as useless fiscal watchdogs. The perception that dogged the Tories in 1997 — that they were venal, corrupt and incompetent — now appears to apply to all politicians. The electorate just wants to tear the whole rotten system down.
That Nick Clegg should be chosen as the champion of this process is one of the greatest ironies of modern politics. His low profile has meant there has been precious little attention drawn to a remarkable CV: remarkable in that it shows him to be the ultimate political insider. The more you read about him, the more he sounds the same as the other two.
Clegg worked briefly as a journalist before becoming a Eurocrat. In Brussels he was introduced to Paddy Ashdown, and became the Liberal Democrats’ top candidate for the East Midlands in the 1999 European elections. He served one term in the European parliament before heading off in search of a Westminster seat, and spent the year before the 2005 election getting the closest thing he has to real-life experience: he became an equity partner in the lobbying firm G-Plus, which represents Gazprom and Wal-Mart among others. This stint as a lobbyist is, unsurprisingly, missing from his official CV, and is not mentioned by Mr Clegg on the campaign trail.
When it comes to financing from dodgy billionaires, Mr Clegg’s party can compete on more than equal terms with the two main parties. Exhibit A is the Lib Dems’ biggest-ever donor, Michael Brown, who was convicted of fraud two years ago. The party refused to return his money. Exhibit B is Paul Strasburger, who is reported to have helped Michael Brown with his legal fees, and donated £10,000 to the party in the first week of this campaign.
Exhibit C is the Choudhrie family, who make significant amounts of money from arms dealing. They are also reported to be non-doms like Lord Ashcroft. Rather hypocritically, Clegg has regularly lambasted the Tories for accepting money from the non-domiciled Lord Ashcroft.
Another major Liberal Democrat donor is Marcus Evans, the reclusive owner of Ipswich Town FC. Mr Evans’s tax status is not clear. What is far clearer is his companies’ record on tax in 2007; his British companies paid just £7,757 of tax on £55 million of turnover. One wonders if the Liberal Democrats have asked him for advice on their flagship policy of clamping down on corporate tax avoidance.
All this is not meant to prove that the Liberal Democrats are murkier than Conservatives or Labour. The point merely is that the idea that the Liberal Democrats are different — purer than the other parties — is just hypocritical bunk. Those who live in second houses shouldn’t throw stones.
It is a demonstration of how rotten our political system is that the election now turns on how quickly the electorate concludes that Nick Clegg is just another politician. Clegg will not be stopped by the flaws in his policies, but by the public realising that he’s part of the system they want to raze to the ground.
That there is a Lib Dem bubble is clear — but the defining characteristic about bubbles is that one never knows when they will burst. If it bursts after the election, then Britain is on course for a hung parliament with a sizeable Liberal Democrat presence. The almost inevitable outcome of this is proportional representation. The Liberal Democrats are unlikely to be so stupid as to taint themselves by doing a deal with Brown. But whoever ends up leading the Labour party post-election will offer a deal to the Liberal Democrats.
Labour rejected PR when it was strong enough to do so. Now, the party is near-bankrupt and politically desperate and would prefer a future of governing with another party to two more decades of obscurity. The Westminster system, which ensures a party wins big, allows for phenomena like the Attlee government’s creation of the National Health Service or the Thatcher revolution. PR prevents dramatic change; it mandates consensus.
Most importantly, it would end the Conservative party at its best. A radical agenda — like that which Thatcher enacted — would never survive the negotiations between the Tories and their putative partners: just think of what Cameron would have to give up after this election to make a deal with the Liberal Democrats. Under PR, the party itself might well split into its constituent parts.
It is incredible to say it. But we are now in a situation where there are two weeks left to save the Conservative party. Just how this has come about is a long and depressing tale. Already, various factions of the party are advancing (in private) theories as to what went wrong. But in truth, more blame rests with the people involved and their failure to implement any strategy than any ideological creed. The problem is not the destination the Cameroons are trying to get to but that they have not yet agreed on the route, as demonstrated by Coulson and Hilton, two of Cameron’s senior lieutenants, bickering over the map in the last few days in one of the glass offices at CCHQ.
The decision to do the TV debates without tactics for dealing with the Liberal Democrats must be considered a massive tactical blunder — the biggest single mistake of the Cameron leadership. It has thrown wide open an election that the Tories should have been reasonably certain of winning. The decision to participate in them was Cameron’s, and he must take ultimate responsibility for it. But Coulson was the champion of this strategy, and is being blamed for it internally, to his annoyance.
Everyone has their tale of what went wrong with the Tory operation. For example: no space for the shadow Cabinet was booked at Conservative Campaign HQ, and even now many of the members remain in the dark about what the strategy to deal with the Liberal Democrat threat is. Candidates were told to say what Battersea power station represented if asked by the media, but were given no guidance, no ‘line to take’, on Cameron’s debate performance. Even now, there are rows over how full Cameron’s diary should be.
For others, the biggest problem is what one insider calls ‘the mushroom-shaped org chart’; the fact that Cameron never fires anyone but merely hires another person to try and work round the problem.
The whole Cameron operation is now paying the price for things not done 18 months ago. Take the ‘Big Society’ agenda. This has been Cameron’s big idea for several years now — born as the ‘social responsibility’ agenda from Steve Hilton, the party’s chief strategist, five years ago. But there was no urgency about making this agenda into something that feels real to voters. Only now is the party seeking to explain to people how it will improve their lives.
All this work should have been done a long time ago. The message needed to be forged, and repeated ad infinitum. Then it might have reached voters before the campaign started up and people’s television screens filled with politicians contradicting each other.
It is a failure not of policy, but of basic political salesmanship. Take the Tories’ best single policy: Michael Gove’s school reform agenda. Mr Cameron did not even mention it when answering the education question in last week’s debate. Not even the leader, it seems, can summon a simple, memorable set of words to describe this policy.
This is a sorry state of affairs. There remain several solid reasons to vote Tory: the supply side revolution they would bring to education, the cuts to the corporation tax that they’re planning, and the transparency they would bring to public life. But these reasons are far from apparent to the average voter, which is why the political world is in flux right now.
But the left has not missed the significance of what is going on. As one player on that side of the debate said to me, the last week has shown everyone on our side how we stop Britain ever having a Thatcherite government again. If the Tories do not win a majority, the voting system will be changed to destroy the Conservative party as a radical force for ever.
Vote Tory on 6 May — because it may be your last chance to do so. This is not a slogan the Tories would use, but it is a grim reflection of the situation the party and country now finds itself in. The Tories must hope that the next two weeks in politics are as long as the last one has been.