David cameron

‘We just need to ram Gordon Brown down the electorate’s throat’ one Tory staffer said to me today when talking about how the party could get back on the front foot. The unspoken thought was that the prospect of five more years of Gordon Brown would be enough to send voters into the welcoming arms of David Cameron.    The Tories are frustrated that in the last few weeks this election has gone from being the referendum on the government to almost being a referendum on them and their plans for government. They are determined to turn the focus back onto Brown, hence Cameron’s aggressive attack on Brown this morning.   PS The Populus poll for The Times tomorrow has the Tories on 40 and Labour on 30, a narrowing of the Tory lead from their last poll.

I'd like to do a final round of responses to comments to my Keith Joseph lecture. It’s easy for debates about Conservatism to be caricatured as being for or against Cameron – and my lecture fits into neither category. I’m a big supporter of Cameron’s, but often wish he’d have more faith in himself: I fear he feels he has to make more short-term concessions than he has to – thus blunting his message of ‘change’. For years, any debate about Tory policy is described in the terminology of Tory civil war circa 2002 (which all too many people, from both sides, are still fighting) – ie that you an ‘Thatcherite or a ‘moderniser’. But now, in 2010, there can surely be a truce. Both sides had their points at the time.

I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same.

So the former roadblock is now a born-again reformer – and, like most born-again types, he wants everyone to know about it.  Writing in today's Guardian, Gordon Brown sells his proposal for a referendum on the alternative vote system as "a rallying call for a new progressive politics."  And, from there, he gallops through written constitutions, Lords reform and digital democracy.  Watch him go.   Amid it all, though, I couldn't help noticing that the PM repeats a key mistake from last year: "I am inviting the leaders of all parties to engage positively in these debates and back our constitutional reform and governance bill.

Voltaire praised the English for their boldness: “how I like the people who say what they think”. The slow and steady contraction of the polls continues, and Rachel Sylvester is convinced that the Tories must embrace risk and revoke ‘health-and-safety politics’. She writes: ‘Increasingly, his pronouncements seem designed to grab a headline rather than challenge the status quo — it’s bash-a-burglar, prison ships and PC-gone-mad, instead of hug-a-hoody, husky sleighs and general wellbeing. He drips out minor policy announcements on broadband and planning laws, while failing to confront a more important issue and force his biggest donor, Lord Ashcroft, to say whether he pays tax in this country.

Over at Three Line Whip, Ben Brogan takes me to task for criticising the Owen Paterson’s attendance at the Marquess of Salisbury’s shindig. ‘But it seems a stretch to lambast Mr Cameron for doing his job as a unionist politician, which should be to find political ways to ensure Sinn Fein doesn’t end up the winner as the result of the failure of Unionism in Northern Ireland to get its electoral act together.’ The Conservatives are a Unionist party so there is no objection to their attending, especially as the Unionist cause is so disorganised. My objection was to its secrecy. Iris Robinson will tell you that there is no such thing as secrecy in Northern Irish politics.