CAMERON CASTS A SPELL THAT HAS TORIES HYPNOTIZED
by John O'Sullivan
Financial Times
January 15, 2006

Digby Anderson, the commentator, calls it "a spell": that is, a will to believe so powerful that it triumphs over contrary evidence. He was describing the British belief that the National Health Service is "the envy of the world". But his insight applies more persuasively to the current adulation in which David Cameron is held by most British Tories and much of the media.

His conference speech, platitudinous on paper, was acclaimed by the Tory faithful as giving them "hope". His leadership campaign won a two-thirds majority without committing himself to specifics. His abandonment as leader not merely of long-standing Tory policies but of deeply-rooted Tory ideas has evoked rapture at best, acquiescence at worst, from those who adhere to them.

Some practical reasons underpin this spell. Voters are fed up with New Labour; the media want a real contest; and the Tories, desperate for power, are prepared to give him leeway on policy. Mr Cameron is plainly gifted and the whirlwind of activity – distancing himself from Thatcherism, appointing celebrities to policy commissions, reshaping policy on the hoof – has bought him time and given the impression of freshness. The spell is partly of his own casting and partly of his audience's desire to suspend disbelief.

Or, rather, spells. For Mr Cameron is dazzling three groups of Tories.

The activists are trying to convince themselves that he is pulling off a brilliant trick. He is presenting orthodox Tory ideas in glittering centrist garb – or, if not quite that, adding new ideas to the existing corpus. For instance, asking Bob Geldof to help forge a world anti-poverty programme may be a roundabout way of undermining the Common Agricultural Policy.

This is too hopeful. If Mr Cameron abandoned the Tory policy of "nationalising" the EU common fisheries policy because he did not want to deal with an EU refusal, he will certainly not challenge the CAP. It is also unpersuasive. As the philosophical innovations mount – abandoning choice and selection, embracing "redistribution", endorsing global economic regulation – the case that Mr Cameron is not changing the substance of Toryism becomes ever more implausible. Even if he secretly intended to govern like Margaret Thatcher on entering office, he is creating public expectations that would make such a course impossible.

A smaller group of modernisers, perhaps including Mr Cameron himself, is in the grip of a more subtle delusion. They see the new leader deliberately "dissing" traditionalist supporters in order to win over LibDem voters. And Mr Cameron's early overtures have paid off to the extent of causing chaos in the LibDem party.

But there are obvious problems with this strategy – notably, that even today there are many more Tory voters than LibDems. To complicate matters further, the strategists seem to think that the nationalist and moral traditionalist voters they want to drive away are relatively few in number. Many indicators suggest otherwise: for instance, in countries with proportional representation such as Germany the economic liberal parties poll many fewer votes than the moral conservatives. Nor do the "dissed" Tories lack somewhere to go. They could stay at home as about 12 per cent of the electorate, including many pre-Major Tories, have done in the last three elections. Otherwise, the UK Independence party, the British National party, even the Labour party under the new flag-waving Gordon Brown would all welcome them.

That leaves the party faithful. The Tories think they have elected Hugh Grant. In doing so, they believe, they have solved a nagging existential problem. Until the mid-1980s, the Tory faithful felt themselves the natural party of the middle class. But since then they have drifted apart as the Tories became Thatcherised and the middle class changed its self-image, political opinions and sensibility – became, in a word, "Curtisland" after Richard Curtis of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love, Actually, in which a multi-faith, multi-ethnic London middle class swears terribly but is otherwise awfully nice and holds excruciatingly nice opinions. This is a global phenomenon as parties across the English-speaking world change composition with blue-collar workers moving right and others left. But the Tories don't know that and would like to be accepted in Curtisland once again.

None of these spells, alas, has anything to do with the actual or potential problems facing Britain in the coming decade. To see how the Tories will handle those, we are waiting for Geldof.

The writer, a senior fellow at the ­Hudson Institute, was a Downing Street special adviser to Margaret Thatcher