Who wins the prize for the biggest recent U-turn? Gordon Brown and David Cameron are leading contenders. The prime minister last week declared his conversion to a referendum on a change to the voting system while, a few days before, the Conservative leader appeared to back-pedal on plans to make early, deep cuts in public expenditure.
Actually neither front-runner gets the gold medal. The winner is known to you all but his extraordinary about-face has failed to gain the recognition it deserves. He gets it here.
Step forward, Peter Mandelson. In a much touted speech on a growth strategy for the British economy in early January the business secretary boasted that “the competitive value of the pound is helping exports and increasing the sourcing of manufactured goods in the UK”. He was right of course. British manufacturing activity surged in January at its fastest pace since 1994.
Yet the Prince of Darkness’s boast was the equivalent of the Pope converting to atheism. With Tony Blair, this fanatical europhile plotted and schemed for years to replace sterling with the euro. Had he succeeded Britain would have been a basket case by now. Our housing boom and crash would have been greater and, without the pound’s devaluation, we might be bust.
The prime minister’s U-turn was less startling. Naturally, he has no interest in the supposed merits of the so-called alternative vote (placing candidates in 1, 2, 3 order) as a step towards a more proportional representation system. As David Cameron pointed out in a ferocious prime minister’s questions performance, Brown was seen as an obstacle when Tony Blair dallied with electoral reform in talks with Paddy Ashdown before new Labour took power. His conversion to the cause of electoral reform is purely tactical.
If Labour loses a general election by a small margin, Brown hopes the Liberal Democrats might be induced to join a coalition in a hung parliament. And even if Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, decides that hanky-panky with Brown is more dangerous for his career than a one-night stand with Vanessa Perroncel, then at least a Tory government will have to go through the embarrassment of killing a referendum, thus thwarting “the will of the people”.
Brown will hardly be embarrassed if you point this out. As a U-turn, it is easily dwarfed by his belated conversion to cuts instead of spending, or “investment” as he calls it, or his deathbed interest in the Afghan war and our armed forces. In any case, the public has made its mind up: the prime minister has no reputation to lose.
For David Cameron, however, the stakes are far higher than for Mandelson or Brown. He is on the verge of winning power, yet his party’s poll lead over the government has narrowed to within seven to nine points. The Tory leader knows Labour has probably lost the election, but he hasn’t won it yet. The voters look for a change, but also want to be reassured by the Conservative offering. Cameron has to look steady under fire and give the voters a sense of what he stands for. People expect more of him than slippery Mandelson or calculating Brown.
We had come to expect that the opposition stood for austerity against Labour’s profligacy with the public finances. The impression was given that Cameron and George Osborne favoured early cuts. Tory apologists argue that no such commitment to early “swingeing” cuts was ever made in any of the shadow chancellor’s speeches but they hardly went out of their way to contradict either their enthusiastic followers in the press or their enemies in government when they claimed that was Conservative policy.
My colleague Jonathan Oliver’s interview in this newspaper with Kenneth Clarke, the shadow business secretary, set the ball rolling, say Tory sources. Under pointed questioning, the old maverick warned his colleagues not to make “damaging and unsupportable” spending cuts too soon. Then, after the publication of worse-than-expected growth figures 10 days ago (a feeble 0.1%), Cameron appeared to agree and changed his tone. “Early action does not have to be particularly extensive, but it’s got to be early,” he told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos last weekend.
Mandelson was quick to dub this a U-turn and Conservative commentators in the press exploded. They must have been reading their Labour counterparts who uniformly complained the media was giving Cameron an easy ride. (Surely there is an inherent contradiction here?) In the eyes of Tory purists if a Conservative leader is not cast from the same mould as unbending Margaret Thatcher then he must be a copy of Edward Heath, the vilified practitioner of disastrous U-turns. Actually, the Iron Lady was rather more flexible and cunning than that, but let it pass.
It is devilishly tricky for politicians of any stripe to call the economy right: it is almost an art not a science. If they promise savage austerity, then the voters take fright for fear of a double-dip recession. If they promise cuts on the never-never, then the markets affrighted by the troubles of Greece, Portugal and Spain, have a fit of the vapours. If they prevaricate, they are told they are as wobbly as jelly. But that is Cameron’s challenge. The Tory leader is charged with being too much the public relations man he once was. His every public utterance on the economy must therefore be framed to last.
How good is Cameron as a performer? How skilful is his team? For a Conservative, he is remarkable, a veritable phenomenon. His personal poll ratings at this stage surpass those of Thatcher or Heath before their first victories. He has revived a failing Tory brand when the opposition seemed doomed to more years in the wilderness.
Yet still the Tory leader cannot quite match the early glamour of Tony Blair. In a colder economic climate than 1997, he faces an uphill battle to overcome an enormous Labour majority and his party’s uneven distribution of votes. His shadow chancellor and election strategist, George Osborne, is clever and quick. Thirteen years years ago his equivalent, Mandelson, was more battle hardened — he had masterminded Labour’s slick 1987 election campaign a decade before he crafted new Labour’s victory in 1997. Andy Coulson, the Conservative media supremo, was a talented newspaper executive with mild Tory sympathies before he took his current job. Alastair Campbell, however, had been a loyal Labour servant and propagandist in journalism many years before he became a politician who managed journalists. If the new Tories are Arsenal, then new Labour were Manchester United.
Now the talents of Blair, Mandelson and Campbell are all to be employed in one last scrap against the Conservatives. TB will apparently join the fray, Mandelson is back at the centre while Campbell is prepping Brown for the television debates and even showbiz interviews with the likes of Piers Morgan. They may not know much about running a country but, boy, do they know how to campaign.
For all the talk of past trouble and strife at No 10, Brown understands how to run a grid. Throughout January the broadcast media were fed a diet of Afghanistan and Northern Ireland, events at which the prime minister could grandstand among statesmen without being challenged by reporters. Coverage of the Tories was largely confined to policy and their own unforced errors, notably their inability to nail down their proposals to support marriage through the tax system.
In the remaining weeks before election day, Cameron will be urged to choose between a message of change or reassurance. In truth, he must offer both. That is a trick all winners have to pull off. What he needs to show is a firm political purpose that can withstand events, not U-turning but full throttle for victory.
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