DECISIONS, decisions. You probably have some of your own looming as the new year approaches, but in the public sphere there is an avalanche of them, all demanding resolution in 2006. Here’s an advance look.
Least vexed, for once, is the Conservative party, sitting pretty with a leader who has stirred that rarest political commodity: Excitement. I’ve noticed that friends usually bored by all matters Westminster want to talk about David Cameron; they want to know everything about him. Within the next few months the British public will reach a gut feeling about Cameron that, once in place, will be hard to shift. Will they regard him as a pretty-boy toff, too callow to be prime minister? Or will they buy the JFK hype and see him as a leader-in-waiting? The current mood suggests the latter — but it’s not a done deal yet.
Tories will have to make their own decision. How much of this “compassionate” stuff can they take with their Conservatism? Will they let Oliver Letwin rebrand them as Labour Lite, with redistribution of wealth what it isn’t for New Labour, an avowed goal? Put another way: Is Tory frustration after nearly nine years of opposition sufficiently intense that they will now swallow anything to win — or have they not yet suffered enough? We’ll have a clearer idea by this time next year.
The two other parties both face a question that has nagged away for a while: Should they change their leader? The Liberal Democrats nearly pulled off a pre-Christmas coup against Charles Kennedy, and hostilities will surely resume in the new year. It’s not merely misgivings about Kennedy’s performance, but a greater conundrum that taxes the Lib Dems. What is their unique selling point if both Cameron’s Tories and Labour are jostling for the center ground? Should they work harder to colonize the space to the left of Labour — thereby risking their chances in Tory-held seats — or follow the route laid out in the Orange Book, with a tilt to the right. Should they put on their woolly hat with Simon Hughes, or come over all fiscally responsible with Mark Oaten? If that decision is too hard to take, the Liberal Democrats could look for a leader who can hold both left and right factions together by refusing to align himself with either. Step forward Charles Kennedy.
The big action, though, is with the government. This is the third successive winter in which Labourites have wondered if Gordon Brown would strike against Tony Blair in the year ahead. Twelve months ago it was assumed a poor election result, if it came, would force the prime minister’s retirement. In January 2004, the Hutton report and a revolt on university tuition fees beckoned. Now it is, once again, the PM’s plans for education, education, education that spell trouble, trouble, trouble. Blair is damned if he loses, obviously, but damned if he wins courtesy of Conservative votes, delivered under Cameron’s death-by-bearhug strategy. If Blair dilutes the bill to win over reluctant Labour MPs, then he looks weak — the word that he himself once deployed so savagely against John Major.
So both Brown and Blair have big decisions to make. Brown has always thought regicide both fails to reward the assassin (witness Michael Heseltine), and brings disaster to the regicidal party (witness the Tories from 1990 until a month ago). That, rather than lack of nerve, is why he has kept his dagger sheathed. So say his friends, at any rate. But in 2006 this logic will come under severe strain. For carrying on, with no change at the top, is exacting its own cost. Blair is struggling to deliver his program — from incapacity benefit to identity cards — because his authority is waning. When John Prescott, and a variety of lesser mortals, feel free to sound off against the PM, you know that fear of the boss, a vital ingredient of power, is seeping away.
And all this at the very moment the opposition is resurgent. Brown will only move against Blair when he is convinced the risk of action is outweighed by the risk of inaction, when the potential pain inflicted on Labour (and his own future premiership) by a coup is less than the pain caused by the current drift. If that tipping point does not come in 2006, it might never come — at least not for Gordon Brown.
The same calculus should be throbbing away in the mind of Blair himself. He will only give up when he determines that his much vaunted legacy is imperiled, rather than enhanced, the longer he stays on. Once he concludes that a longer tenure is not likely to bring a flagship reform to redeem his premiership, but rather a steady erosion of his reputation, then he will make his own move. He might want to put that off to 2008 — but 2006 could make delay impossible.
Besides their own ups and downs, there are larger decisions for the politicians to take. If Iraq now has an elected government, how much longer does it make sense for British troops to serve, kill and die there? In Northern Ireland, now that we know the original pretext for suspending the elected Stormont assembly was, at the very least, compromised — because one of the republicans at the center of the alleged spy ring turns out to have been a British agent — what justifies delaying its restoration? After a year in which Islamist terror finally came to Britain, how can we devise a strategy that seeks not merely to police this problem, but to tackle and destroy it at source? And what of those long-term problems, pensions and nuclear power?
All of these mount up in the politicians’ in-trays — but they cannot be decisions for them alone. True, English voters will get a say through local elections in May, a verdict that will have a major impact on Westminster, proving whether Cameron is a media invention or a genuine force. But most of the time we will have to speak, shout and argue if we want to be heard. In that respect, at least, 2006 will be no different. Happy New Year.
