Columns

Ten Downing Street has been an odd place these past few days. The prime ministerial portraits that line the main staircase have been taken down and the furniture covered in dust sheets, as the authorities take advantage of David Cameron’s absence to spring clean. But the process has reminded those who work there of the transience of power, of how quickly they could be removed and the question of what legacy they might leave behind. What will future occupants say when they see the portrait of Cameron on the wall? Toward the end of his time in No. 10, Steve Hilton would sit in policy meetings and ask, ‘But is it transformative?’ These words, delivered with a flick of the hand to illustrate a thought coming out of his head, attracted much mockery from jaded civil servants.

Downing Street aides nervously run through the symptoms: a flat economy, poor press, leadership mutterings. Then they say, ‘It’s just mid-term blues, isn’t it?’ A second later, they add nervously, ‘It’s nothing more serious than that, is it?’ The truth is, nobody can be certain. There’s no reliable way of distinguishing mid-term blues from something politically fatal. Part of the problem is that few Tories have anything to compare their current mood with. After 13 years in opposition, only a handful of them have been in government before, let alone in the mid-term doldrums. When I put this argument to one veteran of the Thatcher years, he delighted in pointing out that there was at least one person in No.

A few years ago George Osborne would have bristled at the idea that one of his budgets wouldn’t be the biggest event of the political week. His ability to conjure rabbits out of hats had already prevented electoral defeat for the Tories once (his 2007 inheritance tax pledge, now consigned to history, scared Gordon Brown out of calling an election he would have won). But this week a low-key Budget was just what Osborne wanted — and delivered. One imagines, though, that he can’t be happy with the careless way that Downing Street managed to alienate almost the entire press just 72 hours before he got up to deliver it. I understand that an inquest is now under way at No.

It was the night that the Conservatives’ dream of a majority died. The first televised election debate in British history was meant to be the moment that David Cameron moved decisively ahead in the polls. Cameron and his camp had arrived at the Granada Studios in confident mood on 15 April 2010. But the evening didn’t go according to plan. Only 26 per cent of those who watched thought Cameron had won, compared to 43 per cent for Nick Clegg. When those numbers flashed up on the screen in the media centre after the debate, the room drained of Conservatives. The politicians and spin doctors, who had been busy briefing away, beat a retreat. But George Osborne came back and kept on going until the last laptop was powered down.

David Cameron needs a Willie. So say the ministers who work most closely with No. 10. It is not a call for shock-and-awe radicalism, but for someone who can help the Prime Minister as the late Willie Whitelaw helped Margaret Thatcher — gliding around Whitehall, pushing forward the Cameron agenda, smoothing over difficulties and ensuring that Downing Street’s writ runs in every department. Whitelaw did the job superbly for eight years; it is no coincidence that things started to go wrong for Lady Thatcher after a stroke forced him to give up his role. But Cameron doesn’t have a Willie. He has the opposite of a Willie: a Deputy Prime Minister who has his own interests to look after, his own policies to pursue and his own party to lead.