Cameron played well with Europe, but he's not winning this game

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/28/cameron-europe-prime-minister-election-tories

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If modern politics still ran on the old rails, this would be David Cameron's moment. A gradual but steady economic recovery, widely held to be the essential precondition of Conservative success in 2015, is growing stronger. Compared with Ed Miliband's and Nick Clegg's, Cameron's ratings as a plausible prime minister are strong and positive. If the current party battle were next week's Derby, Cameron and the Tories would be rounding Tattenham Corner with the general election finishing line in their sights.

And yet, manifestly, this is not Cameron's moment at all. True, the Tories have brilliantly avoided getting caught in the post-election spotlight this week. True, there may be far less muttering about Cameron inside the Tory party than there is in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties about Miliband or Clegg. Yet there should be no disguising that the May 2014 elections were bad for Cameron, too.

Indeed, the results were not just disappointing for a Tory party whose activists still talk as if it can win an overall majority in a year's time. Given the advantages the Tories could be harvesting if that were true, the results were a thumping reality check: a 30% share in the local elections, a 24% share in the Europeans and, perhaps worst of all, a 12-point gap behind Labour in the key marginal seats surveyed last week by Lord Ashcroft.

But the logical disjunction between how things might have been expected to unfold in the past and how they actually are unfolding in the present does not end there. On the issue that has supposedly dominated the political argument of the last month – immigration – the Tories are apparently well placed. The voters prefer them to Labour on immigration by a healthy nine points. Yet none of this translates into election victories. Even on Europe, where the voters are wary of Tory obsessiveness, events have moved the Tories' way. Drubbed at the polls last week, many European leaders are suddenly much more receptive to Cameron's EU reform message. But where's the electoral dividend?

Somehow the Tories' position stubbornly refuses to add up to a winning hand. Why is this? This is a really important question that should interest observers on all sides of politics. Why is it that the Tories, who have such an impressive history of mainstream electoral success over so many decades, have seemingly still mislaid the ability to win overall majorities in Britain? How is it that they fail to emulate Angela Merkel's CDU in Germany, a centre-right party that has beaten the centre-left at three successive general elections and again polled strongly in the European elections at the weekend?

Some will say that the answer lies in the Tory party's general lingering reputation as a selfish, backward-looking party that is out of touch with zero-hours, part-time employment and insecure Britain, and is unsympathetic to the nation beyond the Trent and the Severn. Others, a coalition of the Tory right and the Tories who fight on in the parts of Britain where Conservatives routinely lose nowadays, think Cameron is to blame, as a posh southerner who doesn't connect outside the rich south. There is something in both these points.

It is also tempting to say that the Tories are simply another old party that has fallen victim to the new post-industrial volatility of politics. There's something in this as well. Across Europe, as the old ties that held industrial nation states together have worn thin, parties once able to operate as big political blocs, and which won convincing majorities, have fractured. Britain, like Germany, now has four, five or in some places six contending political parties. The days of 40% and 45% winning electoral shares, which typified the mid-20th century, are distant, perhaps never to return. Labour struggles with the same realities.

But this doesn't quite get to the whole story either. Parties need projects, and modern parties need modern projects. Those projects can be fundamentally ideological, as in the case of the Greens, who want to reorder the priorities of the world around environmental sustainability; or Ukip, which wants to recreate an imaginary 1950s Britain of contentment and order, inhabited by white people who won the war. Or they can be adaptive and majoritarian, as in the case of the Harold Macmillan-era Tory party or of New Labour, both of which were keen to make substantial accommodations with nonpartisan voters in the cause of building and sustaining an electoral majority.

Sometimes, after a war or amid great social turmoil, a party project can be a mix of ideological and adaptive – as Clement Attlee's Labour government was in 1945 or Margaret Thatcher's governments were after 1979. Tony Blair had the possibility of leading such a government but let it slip. Miliband seems to be gambling that 2015 is another such moment where an ideological post-crash project can also be majoritarian. He might be right, especially if he was a more authentic and persuasive leader. In general, however, majoritarian and adaptive will tend to trump ideological and prescriptive.

But the modern Tory party's problem is that it lacks a coherent modern project of either kind. It is fatally trapped between the distant allure of the Thatcherite, low-tax, post-imperial project, in whose shadow most party members grew up – and which is still trumpeted by the pro-Tory press – and the desire, expressed most effectively by Cameron in 2005, for a majoritarian project that could respond to New Labour's three successive wins. It would like to combine the two. But the political price is now too high, as the May elections showed.

Disastrously for the Tories, they have allowed themselves to turn their backs on the pro-European, social market model, which Michael Heseltine stood for in the recent past and which Merkel embodies in a brilliantly adaptive manner today. The ghost of Thatcher is directly responsible for this failure. It prevents Cameron's party from making the necessary accommodations with Europe, including over internal migration within the single market, that are in Britain's economic interests but which the Thatcherite legacy, particularly as adapted by Ukip, abhors.

The result is that the Cameron government lacks both a big enough bedrock of support – only 27% of British people think of themselves as Conservatives, according to Ipsos-Mori – or a sufficiently inclusive modern project to reach out to moderate middle-ground opinion. This could have been the Tories' moment. Instead it is a moment that signals Tory failure.