The drama unfolded in a ground floor hall, packed with the Conservative Party faithful and the world’s media. But even as the new party leader, David Cameron, stepped forward last Tuesday afternoon (Dec. 6) at the Royal Academy of Arts in central London to savor the whoops of delight over his victory, a young Tory — as British Conservatives are also called — official barely a mile away was quietly flicking the switch on a redesign of the party’s website.
Gone was the old party logo. In its place, “Cameron’s Conservatives”, a photo of the fresh-faced new leader against a Union flag, and a personal message signed “David”.
“Clearly one they prepared earlier,” scoffed a supporter of his defeated rival, David Davis. And it was, of course. So, too, were the 360,000 Cameron leaflets handed out at railway stations around Britain within an hour of his acceptance speech — and a million letters dispatched countrywide emphasizing Cameron’s desire to reconnect with young people, women, ethnic minorities and city-dwellers lost to the ruling Labour party or the third-placed Liberal Democrats.
“We did think, on the basis of the polls and what we were hearing from our people in the constituencies, that we would win,” said one of Cameron’s senior advisers. “We’d been planning what would come next for a few weeks, and were determined to hit the ground running.” It was an exercise in political choreography that rivaled the early days of Tony Blair’s New Labor. And it was aimed at supplanting Labor as the “natural party of government”.
Internally, the focus was on party unity. Politically, the emphasis was on “defining themes” of an aggressively more modern Tory party: Social justice, the environment, quality of life and the promotion of women. Binding the strategy together was the ever-present “Dave” —commuting by bicycle on the morning of his victory; self-confident and dapper at the dispatch box during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons 21 hours later; tieless at a young people’s leadership project in east London for his “social justice commission” launch that afternoon; and pacing through a wetland center to paint the party green on Friday.
By Saturday, with Cameron putting the final touches on an initiative to promote more Tory women MPs, he had announced roles for all of the party’s big hitters including former leaders William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, former Chancellor (finance minister) Ken Clarke and Davis; set up two of six planned commissions of inquiry on his new policy themes; and clearly had Labour’s strategists rattled.
The spadework began last month when the party chairman, Francis Maude, asked both the Cameron and Davis campaigns to tell him what plans they would like him to put in place for when the result was announced. The Davis camp’s program was far less focused — and relations were not helped by the fact that it was an open secret that one of his first moves if elected would be to replace Maude. Cameron’s team left no detail to chance — from website design to central-office mailouts.
By early last week, Hague’s appointment as shadow foreign secretary was signed off. Last Friday final talks with Duncan Smith were under way on his role as head of the social justice commission. On Monday, even as the media were speculating about plans to ‘humiliate’ Davis if Cameron won comfortably, the two men met privately in Cameron’s office. Not only was Davis told he could keep his job as shadow home secretary (spokesman on Interior Ministry Affairs); Cameron reassured his rival there would be no early move to downgrade the classification of the drug ecstasy — an issue on which they had clashed in the campaign.
By the time the result was announced, Cameron’s inner circle had begun tipping-off members of the new shadow Cabinet about their posts. On Wednesday, George Osborne — Cameron’s closest political friend, campaign manager and shadow chancellor (spokesman on financial affairs) — put in train the most audacious of the first week’s appointments, telling first-term MP Theresa Villiers, a former barrister and Euroskeptic MEP, that the new leader would make her Osborne’s No. 2 in the shadow Treasury team.
“The more important point of our first week was to convey a whole new sense of the way we will conduct our politics,” a member of Cameron’s planning team said. In presentation, Cameron was informal and funny. It was an unscripted joke in his acceptance speech — about how a BBC-TV helicopter had stymied his determination to make a “carbon-neutral” bicycle trip into Westminster — that led to the week’s only miscue, causing Cameron to forget to mention one of the six major themes he’d meant to announce. “We got a good joke, but lost out on globalization and world poverty,” one aide commented wryly.
At Prime Minister’s Questions — the theatrical, weekly, set-piece confrontation on the floor of the House of Commons where the leader of the opposition confronts the prime minister on a range of subjects — Cameron launched barbs at Labour’s chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, and at Tony Blair, but sheathed them in laugh-lines. “He was the future once,” he said of Blair across the dispatch box. There was no mention of immigration or tax cuts; the focus was on “quality of life” issues.
“We wanted the emphasis from the start to be on our policy commissions — on the broader process of change we’re undertaking,” said a member of his team. “A stream of policy announcements for media headlines is what turns people off politics. Our aim is to re-engage people.” Osborne, commenting more generally, said: “David Cameron was elected with a mandate for change — and we were determined that the change should begin the moment he got the job.” If all of this had echoes of Blair’s “big conversation” of a few years ago, one effect was to unleash an uncomfortable conversation inside Labour — over what to make of David Cameron and how to deal with him. “He looks good and he communicates well. So, in that sense, he’s a formidable opponent,” one party strategist said.
In the short term, he said, Labour was resigned to “an inevitable Cameron honeymoon” — although twin opinion polls showing a Conservative lead at the weekend reinforced concern among Labour’s leaders that it might be a longer honeymoon than they would like.
But he said it was still important to point out “contradictions” between Cameron’s new-look leadership approach and past positions.
An online fund-raising mailout made it clear a Labour fightback was under way. “Hello, I’m Jo, a Labor supporter,” it began. The Jo in question was comedian Jo Brand. “The Tories think they have a whiff of power in their nostrils and they will be willing to do and say anything to get it.”
A Downing Street source suggested that Cameron might regret his early emphasis on “image” and “policy commissions,” saying: “He is using his honeymoon not to establish positions, but to defer decisions.” One of Cameron’s senior aides retorted: “For 15 years, not just the past three, Dave and a number of us have thought about things that we think matter, to bringing a new kind of politics to deal with the real issues that face the country. Now is our opportunity to put it into practice.”
