BIRMINGHAM should be the scene of a celebration. For the first time in 21 years, the Tories gather for their party conference buoyed by a lead in the polls. In the past few months they have notched up substantial victories, most notably at Crewe and Nantwich and, best of all, in London. They look across at a Labour government eating itself, plagued by the same disease that once ravaged the Tories: rancor, fatalism and insatiable plotting. The inevitable, and heavy, corporate presence at this week’s conference will confirm what has long been true: That the Conservatives now give off the smell of imminent power.
And yet this is unlikely to feel like a carnival week. For one thing, Conservatives are under strict orders to hide all signs of premature crowing. David Cameron knows how bad it will look if Conservatives are whooping it up while everyone else braces for recession. The planned collective backslap for the string of recent electoral victories has been scrapped to make way for an emergency session on the economy.
But it’s not just a matter of appearances. The paradox is that this week is both the first conference to open with a poll lead since 1987 — and the first time in 12 months that the Conservatives have been on the defensive.
The immediate cause is Labour’s relatively successful conference in Manchester. If Gordon Brown had botched his Tuesday speech, the Tories would be licking their chops as Labour plunged into immediate civil war. Instead, the prime minister got good reviews and a modest bounce: The Guardian poll finds the Tories still ahead, but with their lead cut down from 15 percent to single digits.
That fits with a more nebulous sense, apparent in the coverage of Brown’s speech, that the press corps is making one of its periodic collective, if unspoken, decisions to change the narrative. The “Brown as dead man walking” storyline has begun to pall. Reporters like nothing more than a contest: If they are not going to get an internal one on the Labour side for a while, then they’ll have to make one between Brown and Cameron.
But these are only the most superficial of the forces pushing the Tories on to the back foot. The serious and larger one is the most obvious: The world is in economic turmoil. Ordinarily that spells doom for incumbents, and it could well work that way in Britain, finishing off Brown and Labour. But it can also spell trouble for oppositions.
The immediate risk for Cameron is that he is simply dwarfed by the scale of the meltdown. One Cabinet minister this week said he regarded Cameron as a “good times” politician, his smiley, wind-turbine brand of politics fine when the sun is shining but too lightweight for grave times such as these. It sounds wishful, but the minister might have a point. Blair’s sunny style, which worked so well in the prosperous 1990s, might not have connected in a recession either.
This could explain why Brown’s jibe that this is “no time for a novice” struck home. Home Office Minister Tony McNulty said that at that moment he could feel Cameron and George Osborne shrinking back into short trousers. He was crediting that to Brown’s speech, but the real trouser-shriveler is surely the economic crisis itself.
The Tories are in a corner. The financial lunacy exposed over the past fortnight has blown apart the neoliberal case for the unfettered free market. Publics in both Britain and America now yearn for the referee to get back on the pitch and start imposing some rules. Yet the Conservatives are saddled with a near-religious belief in the free market. The shadow chancellor did indeed say that “people making money out of the misery of others” is a “function of capitalist markets”.
The Tories will probably decide that the best defense is offense, and lash out. They will mock Brown for boasting during the years of feast that he had banished famine forever, abolishing boom and bust. They will blame him too, arguing that he should have weathered Britain better against the coming storm, halting this “age of irresponsibility” where we’ve lived high on personal debt. But they can hardly fault him for a decade of light-touch regulation, because they would have done exactly the same.
Rhetoric apart, what action might they promise? The Tories surely have something large up their sleeves. How else to explain their silence during this dizzying fortnight? Osborne has form in this regard: It was his bombshell announcement on inheritance tax during last year’s conference that shook up British politics, blocked an imminent election and put the Tories out front.
Remember, Osborne’s move last year included a step that outflanked Labour from the left, seeking to tax non-doms. He could do the same this year by proposing a cap on runaway executive bonuses.
If he did, it would be hugely popular, from the Mail to the Mirror.
It might not happen. But if the Tories don’t come up with something, they will remain on the defensive — and for longer than just one week in Birmingham.
