So, how’s Project Cameron coming along, then? After another stellar week for the Prime Minister, it’s as good a time as any for an assessment. This was the shiny, young generation that was going to reposition, rebrand and rehabilitate the poor old Conservative Party. The proposed deal, for those who went along with it only reluctantly, was that jettisoning a certain amount of sound principles was a price worth paying for electability and, well, just being loved. “Don’t worry,” cooed the smooth, new leader, “I know what I’m doing”.
Project Cameron would be in touch with – nay, would be - Worcester Woman and Mondeo Man. Particularly Worcester Woman. It would be trusted across the nation on matters of the NHS. Ditto on education. The only thing it would close down would be all talk of Europe within the Tory Party. It would never, ever, ever be seen as nasty. Nor sleazy, heaven forbid. It would even hug hoodies. And it would make the Conservatives winners again.
Actually, I’m wondering if I should just stop typing right here, so dripping with almost hilarious irony is every word of the preceding paragraph. A progress report needs some reportage, though, so I shall persevere.
Within mere weeks of Project Cameron moving into government phase, the pattern of what was to follow had been nicely set, and who better to set it than the Rolf Gruber of the Cameroons, Michael Gove? You may or may not recall, so many more calamities having since followed, that the new Education Secretary was forced to scuttle into the Commons and grovel apologetically, after a list of cancelled school building projects was first released in breach of parliamentary etiquette and then revealed to be riddled with inaccuracies, schools that had thought they were spared finding out their new buildings were being scrapped after all. Double the anger, treble the negative press, carefully cultivated image as the friend of state education already messed up. Great start! But boy, was it just the start.
By Christmas, Mr Cameron had already done such a good job of convincing those whom he was trying to appease that public services were safe in new-look, cuddly Conservatism’s hands, that – as one small consolation to those of us nostalgic for the old days – he had got the streets reverberating once more to the sound of students chanting “Tory scum”. In fact, he trumped nasty old Mrs Thatcher, who never goaded them sufficiently to invade party HQ and trash it (a feat that would indeed have been much easier in the Smith Square days, when little did the mob know that only a garrulous Don Estelle lookalike stood between it and the heart of the Death Star after 6pm).
Securely established as the Nice Party on education, the Cameroons turned their attention in the New Year to the jewel in the project’s crown – the NHS.
Ever since he became party leader, Mr Cameron had sought to identify himself strongly with the health service, making it one of the key battlegrounds on which he sought, as he saw it, to detoxify the Tory brand. He had even ushered in election year with a bold claim that ‘the Conservatives are the party of the NHS’. That line has since been thrown back at him many times, which would serve anyone right for tempting fate so brazenly, but what he said next has been forgotten, which is his critics’ loss, for it is damning in its prescience: ‘but talk is cheap. You’ve got to back that with action, and we have’.
Talk is cheap indeed, especially when one says so and then immediately comes out with more talk. Action, after all, is something that is only an option for governments, as the then leader of the opposition knew only too well. Thus was the stage set for him (and us) to find out, in due course, just how cheap talk can be.
All along, in opposition, the health strategy had been not to frighten the horses. It is fair to assume that this was not just a strategy to be dropped cynically once in government, because Project Cameron, like its near relation New Labour, is nothing if not an exercise in gaining power and then keeping it. What unfolded over the early months of 2011, therefore, showed why Gove’s little difficulty the previous summer was more than just an amusing sideshow, but was in fact the first clear signal, in government, of the Cameroons’ extraordinary incompetence.
There is no need to bore ourselves here with the long, drawn-out details of the farce that has been Andrew Lansley’s NHS review. The point is that, by Easter, not even a year into office, the Prime Minister’s claims that he had made the Tories the party of the NHS were as holed below the waterline as his Lib Dem partners’ claims to be the party of the students.
This is not cause for schadenfreude on the part of the Tory Right. Far from it; the attempts of the previous Conservative government to reform a recalcitrant health service were at least as much about the needs and rights of patients as they were about cutting costs, and even if they were not always successful in fulfilling such good intentions, many Thatcherites were as frustrated as those from the left of the party to be depicted as callous and uncaring about health matters, when they sincerely knew that not to be the case.
In short, the whole party recognised the need to convince the nation anew in this crucial area of policy, if patients were to benefit after thirteen more, wasted years of Labour pouring money down a pit of inefficiency. But what did Project Cameron do? First, it implicitly disowned what the party had done before, making the task of winning such vital arguments even more difficult in the future. Then, after effectively telling the country “we were wrong on the NHS under Mrs Thatcher, but we’ve changed and now you can trust us to do the right things instead,” the Cameroons have only managed to convince voters that this was a complete lie – talk is cheap, as someone once said – and that the party has not changed at all.
If only the party had indeed not changed, you might think, but even if it were true, where would the Cameroons have left the Thatcherite case – indeed, where have they left it – after all this amateurish spin and foolish deceit? The signal they have unwittingly put out is that Thatcherism is not something the Conservative Party wishes to abandon, but it is nonetheless so shameful that it needs to be hidden and denied. That is why this tale of gross incompetence is no laughing matter for the Right.
And whither (or perhaps, wither) the Conservatives’ reputation on health now? Having sneered at the Right’s approach, having said that the Party would never regain public trust down that road, having arrogantly assumed that he knew best, Mr Cameron has opened up a chasm of mistrust that will take years to heal, for, if you are going to ask for a second chance by pleading guilty, you had jolly well better make sure you don’t get collared as a repeat offender, because no-one gets a third chance, not even with Ken Clarke at the Ministry of Justice. Much better to have pleaded not guilty from the outset, particularly when no offence had been committed.
Through its rank incompetence, and yes, let it be said, through its sheer nastiness, Project Cameron has applied the ratchet effect leftwards more tightly than any Labour government ever could, and if there ever is another real Conservative government, under a real Conservative prime minister, its task in delivering real improvements for our patients has been made much more difficult. Well done Dave.
So no cause indeed for schadenfreude over such a serious thing as health; we will have to look to the more banal aspects of Project Cameron for such light relief. As the whole programme of Conservative modernisation has been a study in banality, right back to the earliest tests on Portillo Atoll, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
Let us look, then, at where the Prime Minister has got himself through something as totemic to his cause as the presence on the Commons benches of such members as the ludicrous rent-a-tweet Ms Louise Mensch, or the almost equally absurd Ms Anna Soubry. From the time of the first devious efforts in the direction of positive discrimination under the leadership, lest anyone should forget, of Iain Duncan Smith, the modernisers’ argument was that the make-up of the parliamentary party should be contrived to be “more reflective of society”, more diverse if it wished its voter base to be equally wide. In short, more female Tory MPs, for example, would lead to more female Tory voters.
So, was the infliction of Ms Mensch upon Newsnight viewers every other evening, imparting her self-appointed expertise on everything from abortion policy to phone hacking to 1980s architecture, a price worth paying? Evidently not, from the results of various, recent polls, including the party’s own private surveys. These suggest that a huge gender gap has opened up amongst Tory supporters, with female voters currently deserting Project Cameron in droves. Understandably, commentators have been quick to point out that the Prime Minister may have had some personal effect on this trend with his inept, much-reported gaffes, such as the “calm down, dear” remark to Angela Eagle and his description of Nadine Dorries as “frustrated”.
Once again, the thing to note is the uncanny ability of the Cameroons, from the club bigshot himself downwards, to make a complete horlicks of the parts of their agenda on which they themselves have placed most importance. If they can’t carry out those parts of their programme without such an extraordinary mix of incompetence, carelessness and arrogance, what hope is there for the rest of it?
Well, hoodie-hugging, maybe? That’s a simple enough, if misguided, task, surely? The trail of this summer’s destruction, from all parts of London to Nottingham, Bristol and Manchester, suggests we should just move swiftly on – right out of the country.
And so we come to Europe, or the “vexed issue of Europe”, as one was compelled to put it for so many years, but not anymore. No, Mr Cameron had put that one safely to bed, we were told, belatedly pulling the party’s MEPs out of the European People’s Party nearly four years after buying leadership votes with a promise to do so, thenceforth clearly hoping the whole subject would just go away and foolishly convincing himself that it had indeed dropped off his Lib Dem-affected radar, until a series of rapid bleeps heralded the missile which this week pitched straight into the nerve centre of Project Cameron.
Yet again, as one combs through the smoking remains, the debris throws up the same, startling fact: this was another key pillar of their masterplan recklessly toppled by the Cameroons’ own blunders. If the Prime Minister had followed his erstwhile EU strategy of looking the other way, the inestimable David Nuttall would still have generated many column inches in the likes of the Telegraph and the Mail and on websites such as this one. Many Tory MPs would still have followed Mr Nuttall into the aye lobby; maybe even more than did so under threat on Monday. But alas, it would have been a one-day wonder, for such is the place of backbench motions in the grand scheme of things. It is ironic that several of Mr Cameron’s lieutenants, including apparently the Chief Whip, were reported to have railed that the Commons was being treated like a debating society, for if they had seen that the motion had all the effect of an evening’s activity in such a place, and reacted accordingly, they would not have shot themselves so severely in the foot.
Ah well, off they all limp, another job impeccably done.
Time, then, to conclude the assessment. A party in uproar on Europe; a government not to be trusted with a whelk stall, let alone the NHS; Mondeo Man driven off the road by nasty Bullingdon types in their Beemers (though they might get a Lib Dem chum to say his ex was at the wheel); Worcester Woman fleeing into the Malvern Hills in revulsion at the PM’s Bernard Manning impressions; hoodies hugging looted flatscreen TVs. On every single one of its own yardsticks, Project Cameron has fallen on its face.
But what of the big one, the whole raison d’etre of this poor man’s Blair parody? It’s in power, isn’t it? Well, sort of. A Conservative majority, however? Even against Gordon Brown, they couldn’t get the job done. The only fading 90s memory the Prime Minister seems equipped to revive is Mr Blobby.
Oh well, musn’t grumble. There will always be other opportunities for Mr Cameron to detoxify that nasty old Tory brand. We haven’t even begun to consider how his Midas-like gifts have at least driven out sleaze. Ah yes, Mr Werrity, do come in.