Could Cameron turn out to be the Tories' Kinnock?

Worse still for the Tory leader, Conservative MPs are echoing Labour's attack that he's just a superficial opportunist
    • The Observer,
    • Jump to comments ()
When David Cameron took over the Conservative party, hopeful Tories thought they had finally found their Tony Blair, a young, fresh and modernising leader who would march them out of the long wilderness years of opposition and back to the promised land of power. Fearful Tories have more reason to worry this weekend that he might turn out to be their Neil Kinnock, a leader who does much to rescue and rehabilitate the party, but who can't deliver power. Might this be David Cameron's ultimate fate? Could he be a leader who looks electable, but is never actually elected?

The sensible answer is that it is still premature to come to a definitive view about whether he can make it to Number 10. What can be said this weekend is that the Conservative leader is looking a shade less Blair and a bit more Kinnock.

To be absolutely confident of winning the next general election, the Conservatives need to be showing that they can take seats directly off Labour at by-elections just as Labour took seats straight off the Conservatives when Tony Blair was taking his party back to power. To be more competitive than they have been for the past decade, the Tories need to be able to demonstrate that they can raise their share of the vote in Labour seats. The Tories should be squeezing the Lib Dems out of the picture, not the other way round.

In last week's by-elections, the Tory share of the vote barely changed. Worse for them, they came third in both seats. Votes against the government went to the Lib Dems, much to the relief of Sir Menzies Campbell. In Sedgefield, the Conservatives got much the same share as they did under Michael Howard at the last general election. In Southall, they did raise their share, but it was a pathetic improvement of less than one percentage point.

Defeat in Mr Blair's old seat in County Durham might be easily explained away. It is the by-election in London that has Tories worried, and rightly so. However they gloss it, this was a dismal result for the Conservatives, the worse for coming after a series of reverses and blows from the furore over grammar schools to the defection of Quentin Davies.

One member of the shadow cabinet acknowledges they are in difficulties while adding: 'I don't get any sense that people want to move against David.' I agree. There is no discernible plot against him. But when a senior frontbencher raises the question of a leadership coup, even if to dismiss it, that is in itself telling of the swirl of anger and anxiety among Tories.

David Cameron's overall strategy of trying to move to the centre may be sensible, but this result raises some questions about how smart he and his advisers are when it comes to making tactical judgments. To come third in Southall looks worse for the Tories because they created an impression and an expectation that they were going to perform very much better. This seat was always going to be an extremely hard nut for the Tories to crack. That part of London has been Labour at every general election since 1945. It was one of those places that stayed loyal to Labour even when Michael Foot was writing suicide notes to the electorate. The Tories have yet to take a seat from Labour at a by-election anywhere in a quarter of a century. On top of that, the government is enjoying a Brown bounce, more evidence of which is provided by the Mori poll in today's Observer. And yet Mr Cameron still allowed himself to be encouraged to believe that the Tories could leapfrog the Lib Dems and run Labour close, even snatch the seat off the government.

You can see why he fell under that delusion. A humiliation for Labour would have brought Gordon Brown's media honeymoon to an abrupt end. The Tories had captured the council. The local Labour party was riven with faction-fighting. Mr Cameron strutted on the steps of the town hall with five Sikh councillors who had switched to the Tories from Labour. The campaign raised expectations - especially among Tories themselves - which have been greatly disappointed by the result. It is not Gordon Brown's bubble that has been popped. That hissing sound you can hear is air escaping from David Cameron's punctured balloon.

The Conservative leader cannot shrug that he always knew the Tories were on to a loser. Not when he made five campaign visits to the constituency. The Conservative leader cannot blame this reverse on the unreconstructed elements within his own party. Not when Tony Lit was a model Cameron candidate hand-picked at party headquarters. He was even described on the ballot as representing 'David Cameron's Conservatives'.

A successful Asian businessman in his mid-thirties, a telegenic personality boasting Bollywood looks, Tony Lit was straight out of the Cameron catalogue of ideal candidates. He had a strong local recognition factor and little taint of political dogmatism.

The looseness of his political moorings was what did the most damage. It transpired that Mr Lit had been a guest at a Labour fund-raiser, posing for happy snaps with Tony Blair, just days before he was adopted as the Tory candidate. Amazingly, the Tory campaign team appear to have known this. It was utterly predictable that Labour would leak the story as it was absolutely inevitable that it would be hugely embarrassing.

A lot of senior Conservatives mark this as the moment when their candidate crashed and burned. In the words of one member of the shadow cabinet: 'It made it look so incredibly shallow.'

Here lies the central danger to David Cameron from this result. It makes more glaring what was already his greatest weakness. The perception of shallowness, the sense that his strategy is based solely on presentational tricks and opportunism, was already growing among voters, being amplified by Labour and agitating Tories. Then a glitzy campaign with a celebrity candidate fails at a by-election, which will be taken as emblematic of why the Tories are not making more progress nationally. Even his allies acknowledge that this charge - the accusation that David Cameron is all pose and no position - is hurting.

His right-wing opponents within his party are now more emboldened. They are turning up the volume of their complaints about his centrist strategy. The voters are confused about us. They don't know what we stand for any more. It is time to give them a clear message. This is the cry of the Conservative right which is code, when they bother to code it, for a call to go back to the old policies and the old tunes about tax, Europe and immigration.

Their prescription for a Tory revival has proved to be utterly wrong over the past decade. The strategy advocated by the right has been a serial general election loser. But that will not deter the leader's internal critics from using these by-elections as evidence that David Cameron's approach is leading them to further defeats.

The other pincer of the attack on the Tory leader comes from Gordon Brown. A bad week for the Tories is mirrored by a good one for Labour. The decision by the crown prosecution service not to bring any charges over the cash-for-coronets allegations is a relief to those individuals who have had this cloud hanging over them for more than a year. It is also extremely good news for Gordon Brown. Lengthy trials would have cast a pall over the beginning of his premiership just as the police inquiry darkened the last chapter of Tony Blair. The end of that affair adds to the sense that a line is being drawn under the Blair era. It helps the Brown strategy to present himself, rather than Cameron, as the force for change.

Labour is using the Southall result to drum in its core message that David Cameron has not fundamentally changed anything about the Tory party at all. If Mr Brown is publicly contemptuous of the Tory leader, in private he is even more derisive. In conversation with his intimates, the Prime Minister is especially withering about David Cameron's decision to remove David Willetts as his spokesman on schools after the right-wing backlash over grammars. Mr Brown has been heard to say: 'It is not leadership to try to have a Clause Four moment and then sack the man who tried to do it for you.'

The Brown line is that the Tory party is still too right-wing to be trusted with power, and that is why the people of Southall handed the wooden spoon to the Cameron candidate. The critique from his internal opponents is that the Tory leader is not right-wing enough, and that is why their party is fading in the polls and failing in by-elections.

The attacks on him from Labour and the Tory right are contradictory. But that does not mean they cancel each other out. They actually amplify each other on the most lethal point for David Cameron. They both define him as a superficial light-weight whom the public are seeing through. If Labour's attack is echoed to voters by Tory MPs then more of the public are going to be inclined to believe it.

Neil Kinnock saved the Labour party, but his public reputation always suffered once he had been branded as the Welsh Windbag. Ominously for the Tory leader, the phrase Sham Cam is becoming a headline. If that sticks, this will not be the worst of his troubles, merely the beginning of them.

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures