Getting into No.10?

What a difference a bottled election, some lost data disks and an economy in apparent free-fall makes. In the space of just a few short months the country has gone from finding it difficult to imagine the Conservative party making it back into office to finding it difficult to imagine that it will not.

David Cameron is too savvy a politician to tell delighted delegates at this autumn’s Tory conference to go back to their constituencies and prepare for government but that is exactly what, behind the scenes, he and his colleagues will be doing.

Cameron must already rank as one of the most skilful leaders of the opposition this country has seen in recent times — and in this respect at least, he is truly the heir to Blair.

Government, as the latter found, is a little more difficult however. The politics of support is one thing; the politics of power is another. The essence of statecraft is to reconcile and, ideally, to integrate them. So, looking both back and forwards, what are the odds, the pitfalls and the possibilities?

One of the biggest gripes about Cameron’s Conservatives from their opponents is that they have been vague at best and vacuous at worst when it comes to policy. This is hardly surprising nor is it anything new. All oppositions worry about their good ideas being stolen and their bad ones being exposed. Whether good or bad, all ideas risk being past their sell-by date by the time the election is called.

But if holding back on policy makes sense, it can be taken too far. Aside from allowing an opposition to counter the inevitable ‘where’s the beef?’ attacks from the government, the early release of some key proposals helps it to differentiate its product and mobilize its supporters. This is something that today’s political parties find it very difficult to do as ‘position politics’, structured by disagreements about ends, gives way to ‘valence politics’ where the disputes revolve mainly around means.

Yet because of that shift from the politics of either-or to the politics of more-or-less, policies need more than ever to pass the so-called ‘Wednesday-Friday test’. That is, they must be eye-catching and durable enough to attract attention right up to the day before a Thursday election but they must also be feasible enough to begin being implemented the day after.

Meeting this concern by creating a comprehensive blueprint for government, however, can mean that you end up over-endowed and over-prepared, as did Edward Heath in 1970.

No-one wants a programme so tightly wrought it is inflexible, insufficiently prioritised and bereft of the element of surprise. As Brown and Blair showed with their out-of-the-blue grant of independence to the Bank of England, pulling the odd rabbit out of a hat can amaze and delight those whose approval cannot be taken for granted.

It is also a good idea, not least if one of your themes is to trust the professionals, to leave a little leeway for civil servants to interpret your wishes: they can and should be relied on to rise to the challenge.

The Tories have tasked former chairman Francis Maude with ensuring that their policies will actually work in Whitehall and the wider world. This seems entirely sensible as long as a few ‘i’s are left undotted and a few ‘t’s remain uncrossed.

Trusting the professionals, of course, is one way the Conservatives hope both to improve public services (the politics of power) and win new-found sympathy (the politics of support) with the public sector workers who defected in their droves to New Labour and stuck with it all the way through to 2005. The other is to ease off on targets — the performance indicators that systemically distort outputs and drive those of us charged with delivering health, welfare, policing and education to distraction.

The latent problem is that the original rationale for targets still exists. As public- choice theorists argued, even if slightly exaggeratedly, professional groups can often end up being more concerned with protecting and promoting their own interests than those of the people they are supposed to serve.

Go too far in rolling back the ‘new public management’ techniques that have so seduced all prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Gordon Brown and you risk returning to the assumption that the gentleman in Whitehall (or the doctor in the hospital, or the bobby on the beat, or the teacher in the classroom, or the clerk in the benefits office) knows best. That was never true and, in any case, relied on a deference that is a thing of the past.

The other thing about targets is that they are popular: they empower the consumer of services, especially if they are able to take their custom elsewhere — as many parents already do when it comes to choosing between different state schools for their kids. Never mind that educational league tables are probably one of the most distorting and arguably even harmful products of the target culture. Will a Conservative government really get rid of them or at least cut back on what needs to be recorded and reported? I wonder.

The Conservatives’ other big idea for the public services is to boost the involvement of the third sector or civil society in welfare provision. This is an attractive notion but one that carries with it the risk of accusations that it aims to replace, rather than to complement, sometimes very necessary and often very expensive state provision.

The involvement of charities sounds like a good idea. But it cannot be transplanted lock, stock and barrel from across the pond. In the US participation in, giving to, and happily receiving help from good causes is culturally ingrained in a way that it is not in the UK which, on this at least, is much more ‘European’ than it is ‘American’.

Of course cultural change often requires an institutional kick-start. But it is one of the easiest things for oppositions to talk about and one of most difficult things for governments to achieve. Even Margaret Thatcher’s hegemony in the 1980s was electoral not ideological. She was able to overcome some pretty serious mid-term blues by delivering just enough tangible benefits to just enough people in just the right constituencies at just the right time. Like Tony Blair, she understood the creation and re-creation of sometimes shifting coalitions.

What she never managed to do, as even the dullest undergraduate student of politics knows, is to shift British social attitudes. They stayed stubbornly socially democratic throughout her time in office and remain so to this day. This is not a counsel of despair but a cold dose of reality.

In any case, the downstream risks of substituting ‘society’ for the state should not be sniffed at. There may be little to worry about electorally from the great unwashed whom armies of third sector worthies will heroically set about saving from themselves.

But think about the first cases of harm to vulnerable children or adults who previously would have been in the (admittedly not always perfect) care of the state but are now looked after by a ‘faith-based organisation.’ Anyone who thinks that the government which promoted the change will not be held responsible in the court of public opinion should probably think again.

One answer is close regulation and performance monitoring. But there is no reason to think that this will go down any better with professionals working for charities than with their state-employed counterparts or prove any less distortionary. Anyway, is not the belief that society can sometimes do things better than the state founded on non-state actors being free from the grinding obligation to account for every little thing they do?

Of course public service reform is not the only thing that the Conservatives have been advocating. Cameron’s other big pitch was the environment — a path taken partly out of conviction and partly out of a desire to ‘decontaminate’ the Conservative brand and ‘love-bomb’ Lib Dem voters.

But, as is already apparent, the public’s interest in doing the right thing fluctuates with the vibrancy of the economy. If we are all doing well, more of us can be persuaded into ‘post-materialism’. But when prices in the shops and at the pumps are rising, prices in the housing market falling, and jobs look more difficult to come by, we very quickly think more about saving ourselves than saving the planet.

This reaction would be fine and dandy, of course, if the planet were not in real need of saving. But it is. Easing back on the green rhetoric may make sense as the economy begins to slow and brand decontamination is achieved. Even then, though, there is a risk that this particular politics of support will provoke charges of opportunism and hypocrisy from a key demographic.

Certainly, once in office the Tories will have to find a way of persuading and probably obliging us to act in the collective interest on this one unless they decide global warming doesn’t matter very much after all. The prospect of this necessary persuasion poses a challenge for the politics of power that the Labour government, for all its efforts, has never really come close to meeting.

Inheriting an economy that appears to have tanked, then, is going to make things tricky for the Conservatives ­— and not just in the case of the environment. Whether a slow-down will make it easier or harder to resist the siren calls of those who believe that the party’s raison d’être is to cut taxes is anyone’s guess. Only the bravest governments with the biggest ideas (the Attlee and Thatcher governments spring immediately to mind) go ahead with them in the face of seeming meltdown.

Perhaps the most serious, but also the most predictable, mismatch between the politics of power and the politics of support that the next Tory government will face, however, is Europe. So far, apart from an early hiccup on withdrawing from the EPP-ED, ‘Team Cameron’ has played a bit of a blinder on the issue. Carrying on, as on social policy, from where Iain Duncan Smith left off, they have resisted the temptation to ‘bang on about Europe’ even to the point of fighting a pretty half-hearted campaign to secure a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. We will have to see whether the Treaty’s defeat at the hands of the Irish will allow this muted approach to be pursued much longer.

What is not debatable is that despite the agreement not to bang on about Europe, there exists a widespread assumption at all levels in the Conservative party that on taking office it will somehow move to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU. This will supposedly begin with the repatriation of certain powers and the placing of some kind of limits on the capacity and reach of the European Court of Justice.

Experts would say that this is fantasy politics. The EU is a legal order or it is nothing. Apart from a few minor derogations, there has to be one law for all so everyone knows where they are and no-one gains any unfair advantages. The writ of the ECJ can theoretically be limited by all the contracting parties but it relies on all twenty-seven members agreeing to it. There is no likelihood that such agreement will be forthcoming.

Likewise, it is hard to see other member states consenting to return significant powers to this country either in isolation or as part of a coalition of similarly Eurosceptic countries. Anyway, such a coalition only exists in the minds of those who think that to imagine it is to bring it into being.

Some speculate about whether circumstances would change if we were to threaten withdrawal from the EU. Would this move concentrate minds? The only sensible answer to such speculation, as every parent knows, is never threaten to do something you cannot deliver.

There is no evidence that voters, bureaucrats, businesses, or even newspapers believe quitting the EU is in our long-term national interest. Indeed, it is easier to envisage Scotland leaving the UK — something some Tories are willing to contemplate if not to advocate — than the UK leaving the EU.

Anyone willing to bet, then, that the next Tory government will live up to the inflated expectations of some of its supporters on the EU is as deluded as they are.

The same goes, by the way, for somehow slipping out of the clutches of the European Convention on Human Rights. Quite what David Cameron is planning to do in order to ensure that his government does not come to grief on Europe, beyond relying on the power of prayer, I have no idea. I only hope he does.

One of the reasons many Tories would like to lessen the influence of Europe is that it might help them to create an even leaner system of labour market and corporate regulation than the UK currently enjoys. But here, too, a Conservative government will face problems.

Mrs Thatcher was able to present her reforms in this area as restoring individual rights that had been hijacked and perverted by collective actors. Thanks to the EU and its case law, David Cameron, on the other hand, is faced with a regulatory regime largely founded on legally enforceable individual entitlements. Trying to limit or even take those away, even if it is done in the name of telling Brussels where to get off, will not be as popular as taming the trade unions.

Likewise, ‘flag and family’ Tories who see a Conservative majority after the next election as an opportunity, on a free vote, to begin rolling back the permissive consensus on matters moral had better think very carefully. Like it or not, there is a pro-choice majority in this country. Because it is latent and largely passive, it will be relatively easy for a Conservative-controlled House of Commons to ride roughshod over it and pass legislation to limit abortion.

However, ex post facto, when people wake up to what has happened, the backlash could be serious. Those most offended will be the articulate, educated and liberal middle classes who, thanks to Labour’s not altogether selfless obsession with expanding access to higher education, are a growing force in society. Their votes will be crucial to getting Cameron elected and keeping him there second-time-around, especially if Labour manages over the next two years to turn what now looks like a landslide defeat into something closer.

This emerging class of voters do not see things in black and white terms; as far as they are concerned there is no good vs evil debate to be had. It would be wrong for any Tory administration worth the name to think differently.

In Britain at least, changes of government are precipitated not by a burning sense of right and wrong but by a vague feeling that things have gone too far in one direction and that some kind of correction is needed to bring things back into balance. After a while, voters bank the good things that a government has given them and look to the other party to deliver them from the bad things.

They got the welfare state from the Attlee government, for instance, but after five years of sacrifice they were longing to do some shopping. They got something like full employment from a series of Labour and Conservative governments but they also got higher taxes and over-mighty trade unions and so turned to Mrs Thatcher. She and John Major sorted out those problems but kept health and education on such short rations that voters elected New Labour, at least in part, to build them back up again.

If successful statecraft is about reconciling the politics of power with the politics of support, it is also about understanding this politics of correction.

Stripping everything back, David Cameron has to think about what it is that ordinary people — not dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives — dislike about life under Labour and think needs fixing. Focusing on those things not just in the run up to but also in the aftermath of the next election has to be his first priority. It need not be his only concern by any means: all of us should make wish-lists once in a while.

But we should never forget that it is our ‘to-do’ lists that really matter.