Bruce Anderson

A Pall Mall club: the members’ table at lunchtime: unease and discontent. Everyone wants rid of Gordon Brown. No one is sure about David Cameron. I am asked the questions that I have been asked a hundred times before. What does he believe in? Will he be up to it? The questioners think that their doubts arise from a shortage of policies. They are wrong. The problem is caused by an absence of conviction. After all, the Lib Dems have policies on everything from asparagus beds to xylophone-playing. Little good it does them, because few people believe that they stand for anything. No one thought that about Margaret Thatcher. Yet in 1978/79, Tory policy-making was at roughly the same level as it is now. There was a crucial difference.

Actions are being taken in the British people’s name which should make us feel appalled. The government’s behaviour towards the British army has been despicable. In Northern Ireland, there are plans to give an amnesty to IRA terrorists who were never prosecuted because they went on the run. Though an unappealing prospect, that could be regarded as falling within the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. But someone saw a difficulty. What if evidence emerged which could lead to the prosecution of a British soldier, after all the terrorists had won immunity. A bizarre solution was found. It is proposed to re-examine thousands of killings which took place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, including the killings of terrorists by members of the security forces.

The Labour party is uneasy. For 11 years it has made the political weather. It has set the terms of debate; its intellectual totalitarianism has almost succeeded in branding any non-New Labour position as illegitimate. Now, everything has changed. On the underground, in pubs, people are talking about David Cameron. Though he has hardly done or said anything yet, he has reintroduced excitement to British politics. Some shrewd Labour analysts fear that events have escaped from their control and are not sure how to recapture them. Mr Cameron has been lucky in his timing. He arrived at the moment when a lot of voters were falling out of love with Tony Blair.

On Monday morning, a tense young politician was rehearsing a speech. The performance was less than fluent; the delivery was far too fast. The youngster’s peace of mind did not benefit from his growing awareness that he was being overheard. A number of journalists had managed to slip into the hall. Twenty-eight hours later, the rehearsal turned into the live performance. David Cameron had decided to speak without notes or an autocue. The previous day, Malcolm Rifkind did the same, but Sir Malcolm has been one of the two or three best speakers in Britain for the past 20 years, since he was David Cameron’s age. When Mr Cameron dispensed with the normal speech-maker’s aids, which Margaret Thatcher always used, he was gambling his leadership campaign on his success.

There has never been such a dramatic political decline. Three months ago, Tony Blair was full of plans for his third term. Now, he is a corpse waiting for a coffin. Three months ago, the Blairites were blithely dismissive of Gordon Brown. Now, they are frantically sucking up to him. The PM may have been re-elected, but he has lost all moral authority. The voters are no longer listening; his party is no longer listening. We no longer have a Prime Minister; we merely have Hugh Grant’s understudy. Mr Blair has also lost his political touch. Though he was never good at reshuffles, this one was the botch of botches. There was one positive feature. It reaffirmed the government’s commitment to recycling rubbish.

The battle of the slogans will now be joined and could still have a significant effect on the election result. We already know what Labour will say about the Tories’ new economic policy. ‘The Tories claim that they can increase spending and cut taxes. And pigs will fly.’ The Tories will counter this with something on the lines of: ‘Every time this government spends a pound, it wastes seven-and-a-half p. We’ll end the waste and use the savings sensibly.’ Or — next to a picture of Gordon Brown — ‘If you don’t stop him wasting your money, he’ll put up your taxes.’ In three-and-a-half months’ time, we will discover which version the voters believe, assuming that they do hear both.

Gordon Brown’s defects are under scrutiny. His critics identify petulance, vanity and vaulting ambition. Much of Westminster, including many Labour MPs, several Cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister, now agrees with Alastair Campbell that Mr Brown is psychologically flawed. But this is a serious underestimate, both of his strengths and of his weaknesses. He is more accurately described in another phrase of Mr Campbell’s: ‘An out-of-control colossus.’ Gordon Brown’s intellectual self-confidence is certainly colossal. This is a man who believes that he is not only a practical politician but the most important political theorist of our times.

When Michael Howard became Tory leader, time was desperately short. For six and a half years, the Tories had been unable to convert Labour’s negatives to their positives. They had failed to re-establish their political identity. They were still allowing their opponents to define them, and there were only 18 months to go before the next election campaign. Yet in the early days, Mr Howard brought hope. The public was growing increasingly cynical about the government. Mr Blair’s moral standing, so crucial for his electoral appeal, had largely disappeared. A new Tory leader, with confidence, maturity and grip, could surely reshape the political battlefield. It has not happened. The Tories have largely wasted the last year.

Paris ‘Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France.’ Thus de Gaulle, in one of the greatest first sentences of the 20th century, and he spoke for many humbler Frenchmen — or rather, as ‘humble Frenchmen’ is an oxymoron, let us say many other Frenchmen. This is a strange country, inscrutable to its own inhabitants, let alone to foreigners. Whereas we British usually manage to rub along, disguising our intellectual laziness as Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, the brittle, insecure, self-obsessed French elite takes itself desperately seriously. Every Frenchman who is recovering from a good dinner convinces himself that he is suffering from a ‘crise de foie’.

It is easy to botch reshuffles, although it is unusual to do so twice in succession, as Tony Blair has now managed. But when they change their governments, all PMs have a problem with their colleagues’ sensitivities. Once a shuffle is approaching, press speculation will rampage so that within hours half the Cabinet is feeling as secure as one of Henry VIII’s wives. To prevent that, No. 10 spokesmen usually steer the press towards the real victims. Prime Ministers also convince themselves that this is in the departing colleagues’ interests. They decide that it is better to be given notice that one is going than to be subjected to a brutal shock. They have a point.

For the Tories, it seemed as if August would be the cruellest month. Earlier in the year, much of the party had embarked on a perilous undertaking. It had decided to allow itself the hazardous luxury of hope. Admittedly, only a few Tory MPs had thought that the party could win outright at the next election, but there was a widespread feeling that at least they were back in the game. The phrase ‘all to play for’ was often heard. Then, once again, the game seemed to slip away. The rise of Ukip and the failure to see off the Liberals rattled Tory MPs, and when the party became nervous it reverted to its bad old self-destructive ways.

It is hardly unprecedented for rising Tories to fall out with their seniors, and vice versa. Before the war, Anthony Eden’s friends used to complain about the ‘Old Gang’ around Neville Chamberlain. The gangsters retaliated by sneering at the ‘Glamour Boys’. Now some of today’s glamour boys are said to be irritated with the ‘bed-blockers’: older MPs who prefer to serve on when they should be creating vacancies for brilliant youth. There is nothing unusual in any of that — but Tories of an earlier epoch would be bewildered by their successors’ eagerness to inflate every trivial dispute into a headline. Many of today’s Tories insist on approaching every problem with an open mouth.