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Update 7: January 2006: Cameron’s Conservatives

The election of David Cameron as Leader of the Conservative Party on 6 December 2005 confirms one of the laws of leadership succession emphasised in Politics and Governance in the UK: expect the unexpected. The obvious candidate rarely wins the top job. When Michael Howard resigned as Conservative leader following the Party’s third successive general election defeat in May 2005, Cameron was an also-ran: a bright but inexperienced figure with little by way of public profile. By the end of the party’s annual conference in October he was the front-runner and he never lost that lead. In the end he won convincingly in the postal vote ‘run off’ among Conservative members in the country against his opponent David Davis: Cameron’s vote was 134,446, with less than half that total (64,398) for Davis.

Cameron’s victory tells us a lot about the nature of modern political campaigning, and about the problems of the modern Conservative Party. He was elected Leader for two sets of reasons.

• The nature of modern campaigning. He is brilliant at modern media communication, and his main opponent turned out to be hopeless at this kind of communication. This is more than a matter of slick presentation, though in this respect the Cameron camp was well in advance of its rivals. Cameron has demonstrated an ability to speak in a natural, direct way. He can produce exactly the kind of memorable one liners that are the mark of his present great opponent, Tony Blair: they stick in the mind even when interrogation shows that their content is not original or significant. Compare Blair’s famous ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ with Cameron’s ‘There is such a thing as society, it just happens to be different from the state.’ (The latter came in his acceptance speech as Leader and was an attempt to distance himself from a widely misrepresented remark made in 1988 by Mrs Thatcher – that there was ‘no such thing as society.’). His ability to speak without notes emphasises this appearance of natural directness. The great turning point of the campaign was the speech Cameron delivered to the Conservative Annual Conference in October 2005 – a speech closely followed by a pedestrian, laboured performance from David Davis that seemed artificial and contrived by comparison. That Cameron’s was probably just as contrived – the work of hours of drafting by several hands – mattered not all; it seemed spontaneous and direct. Davis is greatly admired by Conservative MPs, and plainly is a formidable political operator. But he has turned out to be inferior at the one thing vital to a potential Prime Minister: the ability to speak directly and naturally to the electorate.
• Desperation. Labour did comparatively badly in the May 2005 General Election. But the Conservatives, if anything, did worse: not only did they suffer their third successive defeat, but for a third time their share of the vote was less than one third. They made no headway in recovering a public reputation for competence. Meanwhile the Party organisation continues to decay, as the elderly membership dies off. Although all three of his predecessors – Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard – did introduce reforms, only Cameron made the need to change drastically a central part of his leadership campaign, and it is this call to change, and change quickly, that has succeeded, even with an elderly party membership suspicious of many features of modern British society. Cameron is the first Conservative leader since Douglas-Home (1963-4) to be educated at a major public school (Eton). But this distinctiveness is much less important than his self-conscious embrace of change, and of the need for modern Conservatism to come to terms with the values of the wider society. That Cameron, as an ambitious, rising young politician, was himself part of the many Conservative failures of the last fifteen years, matters not all; just as it mattered not a jot that Blair, the great apostle of New Labour, had originally entered Parliament in 1983 fighting on the most radically socialist manifesto produced in modern times by the Labour Party.

Cameron’s early weeks as leader were marked by a flurry of working parties and commissions, and by a number of publicity coups. The most impressive of the latter was to persuade the elderly punk rocker, Sir Bob Geldof, to participate as an adviser to a working party on globalisation and aid.

But for the foreseeable future Cameron has to work with material at hand, and at the top this largely means the existing Conservative Parliamentary Party. His first Shadow Cabinet (see http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=people.shadow.cabinet.page) is the product of this limitation: it is a mix of familiar figures from the Party’s recent failed past, and rapidly promoted, and untried, newcomers. Thus it includes William Hague as Shadow Foreign Secretary: he was a Cabinet Minister under John Major, and Conservative Leader, 1997-2001. But it also includes Theresa Villiers as Shadow Chief Secretary (the second most important Treasury post after Shadow Chancellor) who was only elected to the Commons in May 2005.

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