Following years of flatlining, you could forgive Conservative Party strategists if they had all got blind drunk after hearing of their nine point poll lead in yesterday’s ICM poll. But there’s a good reason why the champagne glasses were still dry in the pine dressers of Notting Hill. OPINION POLLS ARE ONE THING, BUT THE REAL TEST WILL COME IN MAY WHEN ACTUAL VOTES ARE UP FOR GRABS -AND THE CAMERON CAMP KNOWS IT ONLY TOO WELL.
In the fifteen months of his leadership David Cameron has had two priorities - to ‘decontaminate’ the Tory brand and to build a ‘big tent’. He wanted to make LibDem voters feel that they could come home to the Conservatives without being embarrassed to tell their friends they had done so.
It was a strategy aimed at two groups - those who had deserted the Conservatives in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and young, aspirational voters whose sense of idealism hasn’t been tapped for some time by any of the mainstream political parties. The strategy always ran the risk of running into the sand once the Right of the Party realised what Cameron was up to.
Last week the chairman of the right wing Cornerstone Group, Edward Leigh, warned that the Party was haemorrhaging support to UKIP. It was the first time a leading parliamentary figure had broken cover and criticised Cameron’s strategy publicly. It was a spectacularly ill-timed intervention.
Cameron has always taken the view that there are two groups of people you can never appease - the ‘headbanging right’ of the Conservative Party, and UKIP. So when Leigh launched his spluttering attack, Cameron did what he always does. He ignored it. His strategists were also singularly unperturbed. Indeed, they took their usual view that whenever Cameron sidesteps a few skud missiles from the Right, it proves to the electorate that the Conservative Party is changing. They’re not looking for a single major confrontation or a Clause 4 moment. The ‘Cameroons’ are quite happy with a series of Clause Two and a Halfs.
One poll does not a summer make, AND ICM IS TRADITIONALLY FAVOURABLE TO THE TORIES, but yesterday’s results confirm trends in other recent polls. Cameron has broken out of the 34-37 per cent bracket and is now consistently polling 37-40 per cent. When put up against Gordon Brown the Cameron lead expands. He’s also winning back the female vote. So the Cameron camp is right to point to the psychological barrier of 40 per cent being breached regularly now - something unthinkable in recent Conservatives memory.
But the second phase of the Cameron project is going to be much trickier than the first. Having at least partially decontaminated the Conservative ‘brand’, Cameron now has to rebuild the Party in his image.
On the premise that political leaders should play to their strengths, Cameron himself has to be the public face of Phase 2, just as he was in Phase 1. This shameless exploitation of the ‘cult of personality’ may not be popular among some of the Shadow Cabinet’s lesser lights, but as someone once said, There Is No Alternative.
So what exactly is Phase 2? If Phase 1 was all about ‘decontamination’, Phase 2 is about ‘rebuilding’. It will be based on rebuilding a philosophical identity as well as rebuilding the Conservative Party organisation in the country.
Since Christmas, Cameron’s speeches have taken on a slightly harder edge with more ‘beef’ - last week’s excellent speech on the family has gone down particularly well . The media has noticed and barely a week goes by without the 24 hour news channels covering his speeches live - something they rarely did with Michael Howard or Iain Duncan Smith.
As the policy groups roll out their proposals, they will provide the ideological ballast to mix with the rhetoric that Cameron’s speechwriting team seem very capable of providing.
The task will be to translate the policy proposals, not into a manifesto, but into an interim document which will reassure the ‘troops on the ground’ that there is a coherent theme.
The Cameron strategists would do well to familiarise themselves with a book by Sir John Hoskyns called Just In Time, which outlined how the Thatcher opposition developed its thinking from 1975 to 1979. The aim of Thatcher’s advisers was to develop policies without giving too much away and making too many hostages to fortune - a mirror image of Cameron’s priorities today.
If anyone has a harder task than David Cameron over the next twelve months it is his Party Chairman Francis Maude. Maude’s top priority is to rebuild the Conservative Party organisation in the northern cities.
He fears that while the Party may be stacking up votes in its southern heartlands, it is in the North where the election may be won or lost.
Maude learnt a painful lesson when the Party voted down his reorganisation plans in the Summer of 2005. He tried to move too quickly and suffered the consequences. Since then he has adopted a softer, more persuasive approach which is now paying dividends. He’s playing Mr Nice Guy, while his deputy, Lord Ashcroft plays the nasty cop. Ashcroft has told constituency associations that unless they meet their part of the bargain, and build up their campaigning capabilities, they won’t get any support from Central Office. Not a bean. His aim is to concentrate their minds on why they exist.
David Cameron may not have the rhetorical ability of Ronald Reagan but he matches him in the Teflon stakes. He brushes off Labour attacks with apparent ease, and to emerge unscathed from a week full of headlines related to his alleged use of cannabis as a schoolboy, is something few political leaders could have achieved. It’s something his political enemies rather admire him for. Even in adversity, the more the public see of David Cameron, the more they seem to like him.
Ronald Reagan’s other great asset was that he was transparently in touch with the mood and aspirations of the American people. Tony Blair captured the mood of the British people in 1997 but has sadly lost it since. David Cameron’s challenge in the next twelve months is to recapture that mood, play to it and lead it.