"Game on" says Cameron

'Game on’, as David Cameron says – things may be looking up
In Downing Street, they call Unite's Len McCluskey the Manchurian Candidate, a brainwashed deep-cover agent for the Tory party

After six turbulent months of confrontation over Europe and gay marriage, David Cameron at last presides over a party that is not actively furious with him Photo: STEFFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
By Matthew d’Ancona
5:34PM BST 27 Jul 2013
158 Comments
In the car on the way back from the NSPCC’s headquarters last Monday, having just delivered his speech on the challenge of digital pornography, David Cameron reflected upon the distance his government had travelled since the same time last year. All things considered, the PM mused, the political landscape had been transformed.

In July 2012, he and his colleagues were still finding their feet after the “omnishambles” that had begun with the unravelling of the Budget (remember the pasty tax?). The UK appeared to have slipped into a double-dip recession – prompting senior Conservatives to consider the ghastly possibility of a hat-trick. The Labour Party was alarmingly united under Ed Miliband’s leadership. The Olympics were about to begin and Danny Boyle’s epic opening ceremony had yet to drown out the chorus of Eeyores predicting organisational disaster, terrorist attack and national humiliation.

The Anniversary Games at the Olympic Stadium are a heart-warming reminder of that extraordinary fortnight, and of the Paralympic glories that followed. But they also compel recognition of how much has indeed changed for Cameron – some of it quite recently. So much so, in fact, that the PM has taken to saying: “Game on.”

For a start, it transpires that the double-dip recession of 2012 never quite happened: according to revised statistics, the economy did not contract for two successive quarters. Meanwhile, there are tentative signs of a true recovery.

The growth rate of 0.6 per cent in the three months to June matters because it was double the first quarter, and is the strongest such figure since the third quarter of 2011 (excluding the third quarter of 2012 which was steroid-enhanced by the Olympics). It is not the scale of this figure that matters but the direction of travel. If the voters can be persuaded that the repair work is doing the trick – more slowly than hoped, but demonstrably – they won’t send the plumbers home and call out a new firm. If you ask Tory strategists what their three political priorities are, they will say: “Trajectory, trajectory, trajectory.”

Related Articles
Goldman Sachs star Jim O'Neill to advise Michael Gove in education department
29 Jul 2013
Calls that have cut crime
27 Jul 2013
PM takes fashion critics' advice on holiday wear
26 Jul 2013
David Cameron's holiday wardrobe shoeturn
26 Jul 2013
Labour calls for IDS to be sacked over unemployment failures
25 Jul 2013
Gove 'convinced' Tories will win next election
24 Jul 2013

Alongside the long haul of economic recovery runs the central Conservative claim that austerity need not mean declining public services. At the heart of George Osborne’s spending review last month was a radical attempt to uncouple expenditure from quality, framed as an attack on Labour. “What was the prediction from the Opposition three years ago?” the Chancellor asked. “Crime would rise [because of the budget squeeze]. And what has happened instead? Crime has fallen by more than 10 per cent.”

This proposition is a harder philosophical sell than the claim that the economy is recovering: for generations, the electorate has been told that higher public spending means better services. So what matters politically in each constituency is local perception of these sweeping generalities. Have “Tory cuts” imperilled a much-loved maternity unit? Or have Michael Gove’s reforms delivered a free school or an academy that every parent wants his or her child to attend?

After six turbulent months of parliamentary confrontation over Europe and gay marriage, Cameron now presides over a party that is, for the first time in a long while, not actively furious with him. Instead, it is Labour that has turned in on itself and looks dangerously introspective. Party reform, as Tony Blair showed with Clause Four, can be a powerful metaphor for change, a readiness to take on vested interests and strong leadership. But victory has to be total, and simple to understand. Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, does not look like a man disposed to make life simple for Ed Miliband. In practice, he is doing that for David Cameron: in No 10, they call McCluskey the “Manchurian Candidate”, a brainwashed deep-cover agent for the Tory party.

The purest measure of the change observed by Cameron on his car journey is the ferocity with which his election adviser, Lynton Crosby, has come under fire in recent weeks. As a student of New Labour, the PM should have known that the politics of tobacco are always perilous (witness the Ecclestone Affair), and that Crosby’s work for Philip Morris International was bound to become an issue sooner or later. When that moment came, Cameron did not handle it well. Urged by allies to issue a straightforward denial – to the effect that he had never discussed tobacco packaging with Crosby – the PM demurred, complaining that he was not going to be forced into a running commentary on every conversation with every adviser.

His handling of questions about Crosby therefore appeared unnecessarily evasive – notably on The Andrew Marr Show last week. Cameron limited himself to an undertaking that Crosby “hasn’t intervened in any single way.” Marr, quite rightly, said that this did not tell the viewers whether the two men had talked about tobacco packaging. “Well,” said the PM, “it’s the answer you’re getting.”

Except that it wasn’t. Two days later, Crosby revealed precisely why he is so feared by Labour and so valued by Cameron, issuing a statement that sealed off the question like the plastic on pack of Marlboro Lights: “At no time have I had any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister, or indeed the Health Secretary or the Health Minister, on plain packaging or tobacco issues.” As ever, transparency kills suspicion; opacity nurtures it.

I am sure this is not the last time that Cameron’s enemies will come for Crosby, for we are now in the foothills of a long and ugly campaign. In anticipation of that contest, the PM has taken to quoting Margaret Thatcher: “The facts of life do invariably turn out to be Tory.” That may well be true, but it is not an infallible guide to politics. Elections are decided by feeling and sentiment as much as statistics, by perceived motive as much as public policy.

No party that stands for free markets, entrepreneurship and the wealth-creating powers of capitalism can afford to forget the beating their values took in the Crash. The response has not been a rebirth of socialism but a deep distrust of everything. It’s not that people hate Adam Smith’s invisible hand; more that they wonder if it was ever really there.

This is why Osborne was wise last week not to crow about the growth figures but to identify the social challenge that is their corollary: how to make the recovery national in its impact, not confined to the South or to the already affluent. This is not just a moral imperative. It is essential to Tory prospects in 2015 that the party be seen as more than the ruthless hemisphere of the Coalition brain.

As for that election, Crosby says only that it is “winnable” – a sound approach to the contest that will define how Cameron is remembered by history. The PM and his party have come a long way in a year, from a fear that they were embarked on a miserable trudge to inevitable defeat, to a sense that it is all to play for. They are experiencing the unexpected euphoria that Martin Amis has aptly called “survivor’s glee”. Their task this summer, on their approved austerity holidays, is to confront the yawning gulf that still separates survival from triumph.