More from The Week

Until his astonishing resignation from the Commons last week, the prospect of David Davis as the next Home Secretary was one of the foremost attractions of a new Conservative government. On a range of issues from prison policy and police bureaucracy to managed migration and juvenile crime, Mr Davis’s instincts have long been excellent. Since David Cameron’s election as party leader in 2005, furthermore, he acted as a check on the occasional excesses of the Tory modernisers. The ‘decontamination of the Tory brand’ has been a necessary — and highly successful — process.

At a dinner party in central London a few months ago, David Davis made an extraordinary confession. He had become disenchanted with David Cameron, he said, and was considering quitting politics. ‘I believe in certain things,’ he said, ‘and I do not believe the next Conservative government will implement them.’ He wondered if he should try to earn a little money in the outside world. He did not come across as bitter or regicidal, I am told, just disillusioned — and planning a graceful exit. Or, as it turned out, a rather spectacular one. It is now more than a week since Mr Davis resigned to campaign on the issue of civil liberties, and MPs are still comparing theories.

‘What gets me,’ said David Cameron in a speech to the CBI last November, ‘is the deliberate extravagance committed by the people at the top of the government machine, the administrators and managers and quangocrats who administer public money.’ He went on to name Home Office officials who had blown £800,000 on taxis in a year, the MoD, which spend £2.3 million on a headquarters for itself while soldiers in Afghanistan had to do without their proper kit, and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which ate its way through £1.6 million in just six months on hotels and conference centres. It was a fine and timely speech by the Conservative leader, striking a chord with an electorate increasingly shocked by public sector waste.

David Cameron really must do something about the quality of the Conservatives’ leaked documents. Once they offered delicious details of the infighting and reprisals which occupied the party for more than a decade. Yet the leaked memo which emerged last Friday simply warned that the party cannot ‘sit back and let Gordon Brown self-destruct’ and must be ‘as radical in social reform as Mrs Thatcher was in economic reform’. On first glance, utterly unnewsworthy. But on a wider level, it suggests a significant shift in ambition. Radicalism is a relatively new idea for Mr Cameron. His initial strategy was to minimise the difference with Labour, making the leap as small as possible for wavering voters.

These are bad times for Conservatives fighting the tightest marginal seats. About a year ago they were given generous resources to help them campaign, to promote their candidates and to rubbish Labour in general. Now, the cash is drying up. Unofficially, these target seats are being designated as ‘in the bag’ and the money instead is being diverted to constituencies that, pre-Cameron, were regarded as utterly unwinnable. No one in Conservative headquarters is calling it by its name — to do so would court the lethal charge of complacency — but what is being discreetly developed is nothing less than a landslide strategy. This explains the energy with which the Crewe by-election was fought.

It wasn’t the television studios, or the boss’s office the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It wasn’t the auditorium for 200 people, or the ten-storey-high purpose-built building with a two-storey atrium. It wasn’t the overseas offices in Oman and Beijing, the staff of 400, the oak-panelled corridors, or the oil paintings lining the walls numerous enough to set up an art gallery. It wasn’t the $300 million endowment, or the ability to raise $2.3 million from a single fundraising dinner (with tables going for $75,000 a time).

In September 2006, as Tony Blair was forced to bring forward his departure date by backbench rebellion, The Spectator predicted a Labour civil war. It was not clear when this conflict would erupt, only that its coming was inexorable. This week, battle commenced. In the wake of disastrous local election results and the loss of London to Boris Johnson, Gordon Brown faces revolt on many fronts. In Scotland, Labour’s leader, Wendy Alexander, has called for a referendum on the future of the United Kingdom.

Why is the abolition of the 10p rate of tax unlike any other rebellion of backbench Labour MPs? The answer lies in the mood of Labour backbenchers following decades of modernising the party, a process that began under Neil Kinnock but only became a root and branch operation under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Repeated Labour defeats in the 1950s were accompanied by the burst of outriders demanding a revision of an exclusively economic definition of socialism. This plea ought to have fallen on fertile ground. There has always been a sizeable proportion of activists who believe that socialism could not be achieved without first changing the kind of people we are.

Over lunch about a year ago, I tried to tease out the intentions of someone tipped as a possible successor to Gordon Brown. He was feigning optimism and loyalty to the anointed leader-in-waiting, so I advanced some hypothetical scenarios involving various MPs being run over by buses. So would he maybe... ‘Me? God, no,’ he replied, cutting me off. ‘Forget it. As soon as this party gets into opposition then — boof.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Trust me. The queue to be Labour’s William Hague will not be a long one.’ Here were two striking assumptions: that Mr Brown was certain to lose, and that the Labour coalition would fast unravel. This, it must be said, is the minority view.

Spend just a few minutes on the campaign trail for next week’s local elections and it suddenly becomes clear why Labour MPs got into such a mutinous mood. When they happily voted through Gordon Brown’s abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax last year, it was argued that having 5.3 million pay a little more was worth it in order to be able to say that the basic rate of income tax had fallen. No one foresaw what is now clear: just how badly this ruse would go down with the public. The first half-hour I spend with Tory activists in Salford gives a taste of the anger. ‘I’m a pensioner, for God’s sake, why does he take more of what little I have?’ asks one householder.