The Tories must not mistake the meaning of this victory
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Version 0 of 1. All governments, without exception, are coalitions – either between parties or within them. In his second (and final) term as prime minister, David Cameron will no longer be governing with the Lib Dems. But that does not mean the PM’s days of political diplomacy are over, or that Ambassador Dave can put the Ferrero Rocher back in the cupboard. The tasks that lie ahead of this fully Conservative government will require rare discipline of a party that feels liberated and vindicated, and – if it knew the words – would presently be singing Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back in Town. It is Cameron’s unenviable task to keep his tribe happy but prevent it from behaving like a restorationist sect. Related: Michael Gove back on frontline as David Cameron’s justice secretary That is why it was shrewd of him to invite Graham Brady, who chairs the 1922 committee (the Tory backbenchers’ representative body), into No 10 on Friday. There were times during the coalition years when relations between Cameron and his MPs were positively Arctic, not least when it seemed that the PM was devoting more time to keeping the Lib Dems happy than heeding his own backbenchers. It was important to send them an explicit early signal that they can expect more this time than a glass of warm white wine and small talk at Downing Street once a year. After his second presidential victory in November 2004, George W Bush declared that he had earned “political capital, and now I intend to spend it”. Cameron has similar intentions – which is why the unexpected appointment of Mark Harper as chief whip is of fundamental importance. The PM has authority, momentum and the extra yard of pace that is bequeathed by surprise. But his 12-seat majority is slender: it could be overturned by a single surge of rebellious fury, or a big backbench sulk. No longer sharing out jobs with Nick Clegg, he has more patronage at his disposal. But Europe is the catnip that makes Tory eyes cross, and the next two years are going to be wall-to-wall Europe. In the next 18 months there will be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. As Daniel Finkelstein, the distinguished commentator, used to put it when he was an adviser to Major and William Hague, the Tory right will not take yes for an answer. This referendum could be a celebration of democratic discourse, a festival of civilised debate. Or it could be an excuse for division, intrigue and the sort of ideological fixity that makes the voters nervous of the Tories in confined spaces. I leave it to you to decide which is more likely. Defeated parties turn in on themselves like a Möbius strip, and Labour is already doing that, spurred on by Tony Blair’s ferociously accurate postmortem in today’s Observer. But a winning party also needs to decode its mandate and to be scrupulously honest with itself about what its victory does, and does not, signify. It seems to me that we all paid much too little attention to the ground war, accepting the viral assertion on social media that Labour, inspired by its US election guru David Axelrod, was winning the grassroots battle as Obama had in 2008. In fact, it was the Tories who were quietly prevailing on this front: Grant Shapps, the Tory chairman, had organised a “team 2015” force of 100,000 volunteers, loosely modelled on the London 2012 Games Makers, dispatched to 100 key locations on “Super Saturdays”. In the last week of campaigning, Shapps predicted to Cameron, George Osborne and Lynton Crosby, the party’s electoral mastermind, that the Tories would win 300 seats. On polling day the same inner circle was made quietly aware that the result was going to be even better. What Shapps and his team mobilised was not fizzing rightwing ideology but a straightforward strand of (mostly English) conservatism. The adherents of this position were unsure about Ed Miliband, even less enthusiastic about Miliband governing in hock to the SNP, and unwilling to jeopardise a recovery that had been achieved at great cost. What the Conservative campaign pressed into electoral service was not just “shy Tories”, but – much more importantly – the shy Tory part of individual personalities. At the core of every contemporary election is the reality that millions of voters are themselves micro-battlefields; terrain on which left and right instincts battle with each other for dominance. Walt Whitman spoke the truth: each of us contains multitudes, and the question at each hour of decision is which of those multitudes will prevail. Hundreds of thousands of voters who may have been minded at one or other point in the past parliament to vote Labour – “Ed-curious”, so to speak – were persuaded not to take the risk. The public dislikes being told how to live by Strasbourg. But this remains the country of Locke, Paine and Magna Carta This was a triumph of diligent campaigning, therefore. It was emphatically not, as the Tory right and the dismayed left have already concluded, evidence that Britain remains a fundamentally conservative country. If that were so, the two great British institutional creations of the 20th century would not have been the NHS and the BBC: both huge public service organisations funded by, respectively, taxation and a compulsory levy. The British deplore benefit fraud, but they also deplore the politics of heartlessness, in which efficiency trumps decency. The Tories would be quite wrong to interpret the election result as a green light to cut welfare as they please. It is no such thing. Likewise, the public dislikes being told how to live by a court in Strasbourg. But this remains the country of Locke, Paine and, of course, Magna Carta: Michael Gove is a fine choice as justice secretary, not least because he has the intellect required to install a new bill of rights that does not bring the precious notion of human rights into disrepute. Each man kills the thing he loves, and Cameron loved having Clegg as his “human shield”. No longer constrained by coalition, he is also no longer protected by its conventions: from now on, the PM cannot explain his actions with a roll of his eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, and a disobliging reference to the Lib Dems. As he completes the formation of his government, you will see, as never before, what he really wants, and where his sympathies really lie. Was he a man of the right all along, or a “one nation” Tory who truly longs for a country at ease with itself? Will the real David Cameron please stand up? |