David Cameron yesterday put himself before the British public as a man with sound values and compassion ready to be their next prime minister, writes MARK HENNESSEY, London Editor
IN THE eyes of many, 2009 is the year when David Cameron really began to look like the man who will be Britain’s next prime minister. In Cameron’s own view, it will always be the year when his son Ivan died.
Few speeches by a major politician to a party conference – particularly from one so close to a general election campaign – have been as personal as Cameron’s yesterday in Manchester.
“For me and [his wife] Samantha, this year will only ever mean one thing. When such a big part of your life suddenly ends, nothing else – nothing outside – matters. It’s like the world has stopped turning and the clocks have stopped ticking.
“And as they slowly start again, weeks later, you ask yourself all over again: do I really want to do this? You think about what you really believe and what sustains you,” he told several thousand supporters.
The message to voters is simple. He is not some Eton-educated toff, protected from the knocks of life and born with the silver spoon; but, rather, one who understands and has felt life’s blows. And, yes, he does have beliefs.
Equally, the message is that the National Health Service – long the preserve of the Labour Party – will be safe in his hands, and that the memory of entering AE in the early morning hours with his son in his arms will never fade.
It was a speech that was anything but simple but it was used to portray himself as a simple sort of guy: “I am not a complicated person. I love this country and the things it stands for: that the state is your servant, never your master, common sense and decency.”
Targeting Labour’s most disliked policies: ID cards, excessive regulations, a creeping nanny state, he said the Conservatives are the party of individual liberty, matched by personal responsibility.
But Cameron is offering a compassionate conservatism. “There is such a thing as society, but it just isn’t the same thing as the state,” he told the conference. He never mentioned that Margaret Thatcher was the one who said society did not exist.
But he did not have to do so. Everyone in the hall understood. The Conservatives need the biggest swing since Thatcher in 1979 just to tie level with Labour. An elephantine one is needed to secure a majority.
The middle ground must be won over. Voters concerned that the Conservatives’ DNA of cutting public spending and shrinking the state at the first opportunity must be brought onside.
However, Cameron is trying to match that with a risky strategy of warning that significant cutbacks will have to be made after the general election, banking that voters will appreciate honesty.
In reality, Osborne and Cameron have only told them about a fraction of the cutbacks that will be necessary to put a halt to Britain’s rapidly-growing national debt. Pay freezes for public sector workers is but the half of it.
In his speech, Cameron gave a school-lesson in economics, outlining the options facing Britain: debt default; encourage rampant inflation, but this would wipe out savings; or pay it back.
The national debt has doubled in five years, but money has to come from somewhere: “Right now, the government is simply printing it.
“Sometime soon that will have to stop, because in the end, printing money leads to inflation.”
For some, including a former Bank of England monetary policy committee member, David Blanchflower, Cameron’s school-lesson has merely displayed an ignorance of economics.
“This is the most wildly dangerous thing I have seen in a hundred years of economic policy in Britain,” said Blanchflower, adding that the Tory leader is “showing no understanding of economics.
“To remove quantitative easing [printing money] and cut public spending is like a return to 1937 – it could drive the economy into depression. This is the most bizarre set of economic policies I have ever heard,” said the academic.
Such views must not become commonplace for Cameron’s sake, if his four-year campaign to win No 10 Downing Street is to succeed.
He is the Young Pretender, but he cannot afford to be seen as naive.