We’re
now witnessing the tragic decline of David Cameron
John Harris
The
EU vote spells the beginning of the end for the Tory leader. His
legacy? U-turns and empty policies
Thursday 2 June 2016
19.40 BST
It was not the most
edifying moment in David Cameron’s career. Towards the end of last
year’s election campaign, he launched the Tories’ manifesto for
small business, and suddenly tried to affect the bulgy-veined zeal
common to American wrestlers, albeit with the diction of an Anglican
vicar. The result was a camped-up tribute to the entrepreneurial
spirit that was quickly edited into a single sentence, ready to go
viral: “Taking a risk, having a punt, having a go, that pumps me
up.”
One year on, he has
taken easily the biggest risk of his political career, and ended up
looking strangely deflated. We know he will be gone by the next
election, whether that falls in 2020 – or, in the scenario
envisaged by some of the irate Tories who are already after his head,
a lot earlier. Despite having managed to unexpectedly win an election
outright, his government’s latest legislative programme amounts to
precious little: as Michael Portillo elegantly put it two weeks ago:
“After 23 years of careful thought about what they would like to do
in power … the answer is nothing.”
If the UK votes to
leave the EU, Cameron is obviously toast; if remain wins, for the
remainder of his time he’ll be serially tormented by many of his
MPs yelling about betrayal, and making the most of the Tories’
small majority.
On issues from
disability benefits to trade union rights to schools, Downing Street
is already littered with U-turns and tactical retreats. Meanwhile,
Cameron’s former Tonto, Steve Hilton, insists that when it comes to
Brexit, if the PM were “a member of the public or a backbench MP or
a junior minister or even a cabinet minister, I’m certain he would
be for leave. That’s who he is”.
Just to compound the
confusion, Cameron now affects to be a fan of Sadiq Khan, paying
tribute – with the kind of brazen nerve that these days costs
parents over £30,000 a year – to the way that “in one generation
someone who’s a proud Muslim … can become mayor of the greatest
city on Earth”, something which apparently “says something about
our country” (most notably, perhaps, the fact that millions of
Britons wanted no part of a smear campaign to which the PM
enthusiastically signed up).
More than ever,
then, the questions buzz around the prime minister: who exactly is
he? And what does he want?
Most political
careers end in failure. But there is a particularly tragic aspect to
Cameron’s decline, bound up with things much bigger than him and
his party. As the rise of the malignant Donald Trump shows,
post-Thatcher/Reagan conservatism – a matter of free markets,
untrammelled trade and the idea that self-reliance will see most
people right – is fast running out of road. As Aditya Chakrabortty
pointed out in these pages this week, even the research department of
the International Monetary Fund now seems to agree, drawing attention
to rising inequality and the absence of sustainable growth.
A general unease
with how western societies have developed explains not just the
various political revolts now seizing no end of countries, but
sporadic attempts at creating a new British Conservatism over the
last decade. Indeed, with each annual Tory conference, there has
seemed to come a new one. “Red Toryism”, “blue-collar
conservatism”, the “Good Right”, the self-consciously ethical
Tory project backed by Michael Gove – all of them focused to some
extent on a need to reinvent politics, the Conservatives’ failure
to speak to life as millions of people live it, and an economic model
increasingly failing to provide security and certainty. But thanks
chiefly to the prime minister’s lack of enduring interest, none has
ever seemed to go anywhere.
What remains of any
Cameron project? Empty entitlement, an appetite for tactics over
strategy
The strange thing
is, the questions they have half-grappled with are precisely the ones
he told us he had come to answer. The other day I re-read the
conference speech that helped him win the leadership in 2005 – a
tour de force that was inevitably bigger on high-flown rhetoric than
detail, but still promised a new kind of conservatism. “The
shouting, finger-pointing, backbiting and point-scoring in the House
of Commons – that’s all got to go,” he thundered.
There was talk of
the aspects of everyday existence that post-Thatcher Tory politics
had too often ignored: “To the new parent who worries about the air
her kids will breathe, the state of the parks where they’ll play
and the food that they put in their mouths, we’ll say, ‘Yes, the
Conservative party understands that the quality of life matters as
well as the quantity of money.’” Presumably thinking of junior
doctors, teachers, council employees and the rest, he also focused on
the fact that “public servants no longer think we’re on their
side”.
The aim, he said,
was to “look, feel, think and behave like a completely new
organisation” – topped off the following year by his warning that
too often in recent Tory history, “while parents worried about
childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family
life, we were banging on about Europe”. A smirk at the absurdity of
what has happened since is inevitable, but at the heart of this was
quite a good idea: the “big society”, that attempt at pulling
social concern away from the big state, and seizing on the
opportunities for self-organisation offered by the Facebook age.
The concept was dead
by late 2012: as against the Tory fantasy that cuts would clear the
way for some great flowering of voluntarism, it turned out – who
knew? – that without grants, many charities would struggle. Out in
the real world, meanwhile, there are thousands of social enterprises
and creative councils (Labour, mostly) still just about carving out a
social space between the centralised state and the market. Claiming
credit for what they do is beyond even the prime minister’s
chutzpah.
What remains of any
Cameron project? Not much. Cameronism, if one can use such a word,
seems mostly composed of empty entitlement, an appetite for tactics
over strategy, and a lukewarm belief in some kind of continuity
Thatcherism. Some latter-day Theresa May – even the woman herself,
perhaps – could still take the stage at a Tory conference and warn
them about the “nasty party” perception. Most of the north of
England and nearly all the UK’s cities continue to present a
political challenge the Tories cannot meet.
For sure, winning by
default thanks to a knackered Labour party is much better than
losing, but it does not detract from either a sense of slow decline,
or the continuing Conservative quest for a politics suited to the
21st century. Cameron has addressed neither: whether he is sent on
his way this summer or a few years afterwards, the sense will surely
be of a strangely lonely figure, walking away with little more than
the stale remains of his own ambition.
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