Anne Mcelvoy

Does Cameron think the Beeb impedes fair competition? Will he cut the DG’s salary? The closer Cameron comes to power, the more the Corporation panics, says Anne McElvoy What does David Cameron really think of the BBC? A spectre (or several, perhaps) haunts the taupe corridors of White City, Television Centre and Broadcasting house as a likely Tory victory grows closer. Memories abound of Mrs Thatcher’s Peacock Report, which was intended to begin the dismantling of the licence fee, of Norman Tebbit’s 1986 broadside, unleashed by coverage of the Libyan embassy siege, but really a Kulturkampf against a perceived left-liberal bias.

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it. The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project Cameron and who won’t cross that line.

It’s a funny old thing, the Labour party. For ten years it tolerated Tony Blair, hoping that if it put up with him long enough, it would get the leader it really wanted. Naturally, it also assumed that this would entail having the best bits of Mr Blair (winning) without the war-mongering, populist, slippery, free-market parts. Go Gordon! Well we know what happened next. Mr Brown enjoyed the shortest honeymoon since Ian McEwan’s uptight couple failed to get it together at Chesil Beach. A slew of bad luck and bad management combined to change his image from proud Atlas, on whose shoulders the British economy could rest secure, to Mr Bean, wrecking everything he touches.

What do David Cameron, David Miliband, Nick Clegg, Yvette Cooper, Michael Gove and (just about) George Osborne have in common? They are part of the Jam Generation: a powerful cross-party phenomenon laying the foundations of our political futures. The soundtrack to their formative years is Paul Weller’s tuneful, raucous songs of the 1980s: ‘The public gets what the public wants/ But I don’t get what this society wants/ I’m going underground . . .’ Now they are at, or near, the top of politics: two party leaders and the foreign secretary are sons of the Weller years. So are the fast risers in Gordon Brown’s latest Cabinet reshuffle. Some, like James Purnell and Andy Burnham, are really the little brothers of the Weller era and coming up fast behind.

Deep party feuds never really die: they just lie buried under the flimsy covering of the good times. For Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, such times have been brief indeed. My yoga teacher tells her wobbly pupils that the point of balance in a perfect headstand is the point just before we fall over. Mr Brown has discovered this goes for politics too. Not least among his many horrors in a parliamentary session overwhelmed by a building society crisis, carelessly lost confidential files, inaccurate data on foreign workers and the funding scandal from hell, is the return of negative comparisons with his predecessor. As soon as I heard people close to the PM saying at Labour conference, ‘Who really misses Blair now?’, I knew fate was being sorely tempted.

The Conservative leader needs to get his mojo back. At least he had some to start with, mojo not being a quality much associated with his predecessors: ‘That often elusive quality that sets a person apart from everyone else. The word “magic” could, almost without exception, replace it in all of its contexts, sentences or applications.’ So says urbandictionary.com and it should know. Yet something has gone wrong with Dave’s magic. We are approaching the point when the Conservative chances at the next election will either crystallise or begin to break apart. Having risen to 37-38 per cent in the polls, Mr Cameron is drifting downwards — well away from the 41 per cent minimum he needs to contend for victory.

Will the Labour party go bonkers after Blair? I only ask because the early signs are worrying — or reassuring — depending what view you take of these things. To judge by the attitudes and prejudices manifesting themselves in the transition from Mr Blair to Mr Brown, the party is gagging to put itself on the wrong side of the electorate. The Blairite attachment to the reformist centre-ground is absolute and has all the binding force of a sacred text. Of course, its potential has not been realised in many areas and there have been what the PM primly calls ‘unhelpful distractions’, like a war gone wrong and the Met at the door. But fiercely guarding that territory is what Mr Blair and his allies have done best through three elections.

No, since you ask, he wasn’t drunk. I read with some interest that the former Home Secretary had been on the sauce when he told me that the Chancellor’s behaviour last week had been ‘absolutely stupid’ and attacked his suitability for the leadership. Like Shakespeare’s Menenius, Mr Clarke is well-known as a politician who ‘loves a cup of hot wine/ with not a drop of allaying Tiber in’t’, but on late Thursday morning when we sat down to discuss the revolt against Mr Blair and its consequences, he didn’t touch a drop. What he was doing was something altogether more calculated and dangerous than lashing out after a drink.

One day at the Commons recently, just before Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron found himself in the gents next to Gordon Brown. The two said a brief hello and then silence fell. As Mr Brown left, he said to the Conservative leader over his shoulder: ‘Good luck’. What struck me — beyond the mischievous interpretation that this was a shade disloyal to his own leader — was that it was the first time Mr Brown has sent a message to the Tory leader that their relationship will outlive the premiership of Mr Blair. Unless a meteor arrives to unseat him from the role as successor to Mr Blair, Brown vs Cameron is the shape of the next election. Indeed, its first skirmishes are already being fought, even while the PM remains stubbornly in post.