What was the point of the party conferences? The Conversation, 2 October 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

“War – huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”, sang Edwin Starr back in the sixties. Most people say the same about party conferences. They take up half a week. They cost a fortune. They don’t actually decide anything important, especially when it comes to policy. And hardly any ordinary party members, or for that matter even MPs, even turn up to them these days.

And yet. And yet. Year after year they go on, albeit more often in big city centres than spa or seaside towns (although this year I got to sample both, nipping over to Brighton with Labour and up to Manchester with the Tories). Presumably, then, there must still be a point to them.

In fact, there are several. The dirty little secret is that for at least some of the parties, they may well be money-spinners. That explains why so many of those attending these days work for pressure groups, lobbyists (sorry, I mean public affairs companies) and think tanks. These guys are paying top dollar to attend and then more of the same if they want a stand in one of the cavernous (the Conservatives) or cosy (Labour) exhibition areas, where they are joined by retailers selling books, jewellery, clothes, trinkets and tat, companies flogging their services and caterers providing the refreshments that everyone seems to need, whether or not they’ve managed to grab (depending on the time of day) a handful of Pringles and a glass of wine or similarly free cookies and coffee at one of the various fringe meetings (most of them commercially-sponsored) going on around the place.

Fringe benefits

For some attendees, the fringe is where it’s at. Indeed there are plenty of people who rarely and perhaps even never venture into the conference hall itself, except perhaps to listen to the one celebrity politician whose ‘day it is’ – Monday, George, Tuesday, Boris, Wednesday, Dave, etc, etc. At the Tory conference, there were hundreds of these smaller meetings – many of them packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the fact that they often seemed to covering an issue that had been covered the day before, would be covered the day afterwards and might even be being discussed at exactly the same time in a different room.

Perhaps it said something about the Tories’ will to win this year that there seemed to be so many meetings in Manchester addressing exactly how they were going to pull it off, given squeezed household incomes, an electoral system massively biased to Labour, and a complete failure to make inroads into northern, urban and ethnic minority communities. Most of the panellists – at least at these events – were politicians, print-journalists, think-tankers and pollsters. For good or ill, academic experts on voting behaviour were conspicuous by their absence. Whether they are missing a trick or are well off out of it, I’ll leave it to others to judge.

Ritual gathering

Nearly all of these events could have taken place – indeed, often do take place – in London. Indeed, there is a sense in which Conference is partly about letting people who live elsewhere actually see (and ask questions) of those they already read day-in-day-out and, for the most part, agree with. Whether many minds get changed here – or in the conference hall – is pretty doubtful.

And that, in some ways, is the point. Conferences are still a gathering of the tribe for a ritual that may have morphed over the years but is still essentially a symbolic reaffirmation that those who attend are not a strange and/or beleaguered minority. This is as crucial for mobilising the few genuine activists still left in seats that are safe or winnable as it is for helping to ensure the renewal of direct debits by those living in towns and cities (like Manchester, in the case of the Tories) where the party is thin, bordering on non-existent on the ground. Conference also offers the chance of a handshake, maybe even a quick chat with an MP or even a (Shadow) Cabinet Minister. It may seem strange to people who don’t take an interest in politics but these people – to members anyway – are celebrities. It’s a buzz to meet them and a warm fuzzy memory to take home, and maybe even drop casually into the conversation with friends and family (particularly political friends and family) back home.

Ups, downs and bounces

For non-members, of course, the motives and incentives are different. For think-tankers and lobbyists it may offer a chance to show funders and clients that they’re supposedly getting the agenda or having an influence with the politicians who really matter (or at least their special advisers). For journalists, it’s a chance to “take the temperature of the party”, to see who’s up and who might be going down – perhaps in the reshuffles that might take place between the end of the conference season and the start of the new parliamentary term. And for politicians, it’s a chance to prove their chops, if they’re up and coming, or that they’ve still got it, if they’re big beasts.

And for those at the very top of the tree (the leader and his or her entourage), conference presents one big media opportunity – made all the more special by the fact that all the parties have an unspoken pact with each other to give each other a free run. That opportunity is capped of course by the leader’s speech – a way to rally the troops, convince the journalists (and through them the folks at home) that you, and not your opponent, has what it takes. Talk of a “conference bounce”, however, in the end is largely misguided: either they all end up balancing each other out or any increase in support only lasts a few weeks before a party’s poll ratings return to their long-term trend.

For the vast majority who don’t go to party conference and who pay them next to no attention, then, they may as well not take place. But for those who attend, they fulfil a whole bunch of functions. Certainly, with the odd exception (and there wasn’t one this year), they leave pretty much everyone there feeling good about themselves, and maybe, in the grand scheme of things and in an otherwise cynical world, that’s no mean achievement.

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For his speech, David Cameron will surely lean on ethos, pathos and logos, Guardian, 2 October 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

The pressure is on. David Cameron’s closing speech to his party’s conference will be his eighth as Tory leader, and his MPs and grassroots supporters are hoping that he can top Ed Miliband’s effort in Brighton last week. While they are bound to be wondering whether he too can come up with two or three potentially game-changing announcements, the fact is he’ll inevitably be judged as much by his presentation as his policies.

If previous years are anything to go by, however, Cameron is likely to pass this particular test with flying colours – and not simply because he possesses a modicum of stage presence, a good memory and often pitch-perfect delivery. It’s also because, with more than a little help from his speechwriters, the Conservative leader is something of a dab hand at the ancient arts of rhetoric and oratory. What better way to explore his techniques, then, than through the classics?

The first thing anyone reading about rhetoric learns is that ethos, pathos and logos aren’t the names of the three musketeers but rather the primary modes of persuasive appeal outlined by the Greek polymath, Aristotle. Ethos is about establishing credibility; pathos is forging an emotional connection; and logos is reasoned argument.

As far as ethos goes, Cameron’s main concern, right from the start, has been not so much to assert his authority as to stress his authenticity. In order to scotch the pervasive notion that he is little more than a slick, metropolitan posh boy, the Tory leader characteristically emphasises both his traditional values and his simultaneous willingness to confront his party’s prejudices. He routinely recalls the adversities his family has faced. Occasionally, he resorts to the “this is the real me so who needs notes?” trick that helped win him the leadership in the first place – although that probably pays fewer dividends now that the leader of the opposition has got in on the act too.

Still, being PM makes ethos much less of a problem since it derives as much from status as it does from character. Mind you, the former provides plenty of additional chances to prove the latter, not least because of all the opportunities it gives Cameron to show how he’s standing up for Britain. Expect more of the same this time.

Cameron tends to seek pathos in very predictable places: his children and his parents – and their disabilities – being the most obvious examples, although they are sometimes joined by “real people” he’s met or who have written to him. For all that, Cameron is actually pretty cautious about trying to conjure up melodramatic images, or enargia.

Cameron is well aware, however, that an emotional connection can be achieved by laughter as well as tears. His jokes are almost always corny and contrived, although less so, interestingly, when he’s feeling brave enough to tease his own traditionalists. He even tries now and then to be a touch risqué – or at least what passes as such in Conservative circles. And for someone often thought of as preternaturally arrogant, he actually does self-deprecation pretty well.

That said, Cameron’s most consistent and characteristic effort at pathos revolves around his appeals to optimism, particularly (though not exclusively) in perorations ladled with anaphora (one sentence after another beginning with the same word or phrase) that sometimes blur not only second and first person, plural and singular, but also party, voters and nation.

What is noticeable, however, is that since moving into No 10, Cameron has put a lot more emphasis on logos, as he did last year in Birmingham when he made a sustained case for the need to get this country fit for the “global race”. Yet even when making a conspicuously reasoned argument, Cameron still relies just as much on supposedly self-evident truths as on the detailed (sometimes statistical) evidence he increasingly inserts into his speeches.

In the end, though, we can’t say for sure what Cameron will come up with this time round. After all, to the truly skilled orator, decorum (appropriateness) and kairos (timeliness) are crucial considerations. Each and every party conference speech presents a slightly different challenge – Cameron will almost certainly rise to this one.

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What happened to Tory modernisation, Telegraph, 30 September 2013

Posted on October 4, 2013 by tpbale

As David Cameron finally delivers on his promise to recognise marriage in the tax system and announces yet more action on immigration and welfare, it seems like a good time to ask whether – despite the valiant efforts of commentators like Ian Birrell and Matthew d’Ancona and think tanks like Bright Blue – it’s all over for Tory modernisation.

To work out what has become of modernisation and to guess where it might be going, however, we first need to appreciate that it was always a contingent, ambivalent affair that was latched on to rather than actually led by Cameron and which presented a challenge to Conservative instincts that was always more limited and less head-on than some of its standard-bearers liked to imply.

The ambivalence was there even in its earliest and most easily recognised focus on cultural and social liberalism – the idea that the party should face up to the fact that society had changed in ways that could not be reversed and which, therefore, ought not to be railed against. On one hand, the party was urged to declare an end to its war on single parents. Yet on the other hand, it insisted that society was somehow “broken” and that many of its problems were rooted in poor parenting and family breakdown.

Arguably, however, Tory modernisation was at its most ambiguous – critics would say disingenuous – when it came to public services and public spending – and, indeed, the economy more generally. Insofar as it was a response for a coming to terms with the Britain that New Labour had helped to usher into being, modernisation was also a recognition that pledging ever-lower taxes and keeping the nation’s health, education and pension systems on shorter and shorter rations was no way to run the country – or to convince voters that the party knew how to run it in the way they wanted.

Given that it was in part the product of a more benign economic climate and that its advocates failed in opposition to fully persuade more than a minority of their party colleagues and supporters of its merits, it is hardly surprising that in government and in an age of austerity, modernisation seems to have stalled rather than snowballed.

But not everything that was solid – or at least halfway solid – about the project has melted into air. As if to provide proof of its centrality, parts of modernisation’s socially liberal agenda have been pursued to the last and to the letter. Legislating for gay marriage and sticking to the commitment to ring-fence overseas aid spending sent out a signal that Cameron and those around him retain at least some of the principles that gained the Tories’ “permission to be heard” by some, if not all, of the well-educated and well-heeled voters the party needs onside in order to win elections. The problem is they don’t make much sense to large numbers of Conservative MPs and grassroots members, or indeed to a fair few members of the general public.

It may be no coincidence, then, that the area in which Tory modernisation may end up achieving the most – albeit under the radar of voters – is not policy but process. Nor, perhaps, is it a coincidence that the man at the cutting edge of changing the way government goes about its business is Francis Maude – surely the modernisers’ moderniser. There is no guarantee, though, that the very inertia and vested interests that Maude hopes to overcome in Whitehall and beyond won’t end up doing for his plans. The same is true – in spades – for another Tory determined to tell it like it is, Nick Boles, whose supply-side reforms strike at the heart of small-C countryside conservatism.

In other important areas, the picture is decidedly mixed. Some of the Government’s policies on immigration and education are simply traditionalist measures that can claim little or no convincing connection with modernisation other than the fact the ministers introducing them – Theresa May and Michael Gove – were associated, at least in a previous life, with that cause. And even those which can make a claim to be truly modernising, such as speeding up things for firms wanting to recruit the ‘brightest and the best’ and introducing free schools, go comfortably and conveniently with, rather than against, the grain of traditional conservatism.

Whether or not individual government policies can be convincingly connected back to Tory modernisation, it is worth noting that their chances of making a real and lasting impact are unlikely to be overly affected by whether Cameron stays on as leader in the long term – primarily because he has always been more about selling than designing and driving them. Whether, then, modernisation would receive a new lease of life under another leader – be it a “ground-floor” moderniser like Gove or simply one of those who “got it” early on, like May – would be interesting to see.

It may be, of course, that “modernisation mk II”, like the Conservative party itself, is simply waiting for Boris. Even if the current Mayor of London ends up winning, however, his talent for being all things to all Tories means that anticipating what that win would mean for the party, let alone for modernisation, involves seeing through a glass very, very darkly indeed.

A full version of this article is published by IPPR in Juncture.

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Cameron and the Conservatives: a start of term report, PSA Blog, 27 September, 2013

Posted on September 29, 2013 by tpbale

Assurances over the summer that David Cameron was well on the way to healing relations with some of his backbenchers (via a combination of Number Ten BBQs, economic recovery and the PM’s support for the EU Referendum Bill) look a little optimistic in the light of last month’sCommons rebellion on launching military strikes on Syria.

Clearly, there were reasoned objections to taking part in any mission against Assad on the part of those who voted against their own government.  But a look at the list of those who did so reveals that many of them had form.  Few, then, would bet against some of the same people deciding to give Cameron another bloody nose and forcing him into future climb-downs on other issues. Obvious possibilities here include reforms to the planning system or HS2, both of which touch a sore nerve even with backbenchers more favourably inclined to their party leader.

On the other hand, while Syria may have been a humiliation, it was by no means the PR disaster that many anticipated.  Partly due to Cameron more or less gracefully accepting defeat and thereby appearing to have listened to the great British public (who are clearly not up for going to war on this issue) and party because of the Tories’ effective media operation against Ed Miliband’s supposed perfidy and indecision, the Prime Minister and his party actually emerged relatively unscathed from the affair.  Indeed, a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times published on 8 September suggested 41% think Cameron responded well, with only 27% thinking the same about Miliband.

In fact, on virtually every measure that counts, the Prime Minister remains not just an asset to the Tories (in the sense of being more popular than his party) but way ahead of the Leader of the Opposition.  Of course, many observers recall that such a gap did not prevent Mrs Thatcher from beating Jim Callaghan back in 1979 or Ted Heath from doing the same to Harold Wilson in 1970.  But this is to forget that – before the polls began to narrow in the government’s favour as election day approached – the Opposition had in both cases been recording leads that were much bigger than Labour has achieved since 2010.

This is not to say that the Conservatives are on course for an overall majority at the next election; but there remains at least a reasonable chance that they will emerge as the largest single party, giving Cameron first go at forming another government.

To achieve that goal, the Tories are clearly sticking to an obvious but possibly very effective strategy, namely convincing people of three things. The first is that, owing to their tough love, the economy is on the up and that to allow Labour back in would be a huge risk.  The second is that Labour is led by a guy who’s supposedly not up to the job, in hock to the unions, weak on welfare and immigration, surrounded by many of the same people who allegedly made such a mess of things in the first place, and, after his conference promise to freeze utility bills and grab land to build houses, a seventies-style left-winger.  The third is that fears about what a Tory government would mean for schools, hospitals, pensions and the police have not in fact come to pass.

On the economy, the main challenge (one taken up a recent speech by George Osborne) is to convince people that the recovery they are hearing so much about these days is actually real – something they can feel, touch and taste – which is why the Tories know they cannot allow Labour to make the running on the cost of living.  Economic pessimism is falling and optimism is rising, opinion polls suggest, but real wages – often a crucial indicator when it comes to electoral success – are not.  There is little the government can or is willing to do about this: wage rises mean extra costs for businesses only just beginning to get going again; the utility companies appear to be untouchable (unless, that is, Miliband’s promises prove so popular they provoke a Tory counter-offer); and there is – to a prudent Chancellor anyway – limited scope for tax cuts.  In short, it may be that the Conservatives have to rely on their rhetoric to some extent trumping reality – one reason why, inevitably, they will be doing as much, à la 1992, to undermine their opponents as trumpet their own record.

On Miliband and Labour, the Tories seem, with a little help from their supporters in the media, to have won the battle of perceptions, even if those perceptions do shift a little in the light of the Opposition’s successful conference.  In the longer-term, even if Ed does manage to win some sort of symbolic victory over union leaders, there is no guarantee that it will resonate with the public as much as some Labour supporters hope.  And anyway there is no way that such a victory will somehow shame the Conservatives into making less use than they otherwise would do of the election war chest they have amassed, thereby rendering any shortfall in union funding even more damaging.  On the other hand, all polling suggests that the six or so percentage points’ worth of erstwhile Lib Dems that Labour has gained since 2010 is going nowhere, especially perhaps after the vote on Syria.  That makes it difficult to see, given how stacked the electoral system is against him, where Cameron is going to get the extra five or so additional percentage points he needs at minimum to form a Tory majority government.

Retaining voters’ trust on public services could also prove trickier than many Tories assume.  Most problematic in this respect are schools (in particular the pressure on primary pupil numbers) and hospitals (in particular the pressure on A&E this winter).  Both issues can be used to cast doubt not just on the Tories’ commitment to publicly-provided education and health but, just as damagingly, their competence too.  The announcement of extra funding for A&E departments and the extension of free school meals may help, but they won’t be silver bullets.

That said, the Conservative Party can claim to have upped its game when it comes to communications.  Lynton Crosby has clearly helped simplify the message.  Jim Messina may help too.  And making Graeme Wilson, the deputy political editor at The Sun, Cameron’s Press Secretary might also be a smart move.  Sharpening up the campaigning and communications operation, however, might not entirely make up for lack of boots on the ground at the election, particularly if it proves to be a very close contest.  Although Labour’s trade union troubles (and the Tories’ cash reserves) may eventually redress the balance, the marginals look…well…marginal.

And then there is UKIP.  His party conference may have been derailed by Geoffrey Bloom’s remarks about sluts, but Farage is likely to come roaring back at the Europeans, and still stands a reasonable chance of finishing first.  The crucial question, then, is whether Cameron can then keep him out of any television election debates.  If he can’t, they may not take place at all.  If he can, the Tories may still not recover the five or so percentage points’ worth of former supporters who have succumbed to Nigel’s charms.  If most of them remain under his spell, and if those previous non-voters and first-timers who currently claim they would vote UKIP do the same, then the Tories’ worst fears may be confirmed.  Trying to counter UKIP by copying its policies, however, may well be a fool’s errand, running the risk of losing as many voters in the centre as it attracts on the right.

The Tories, then, have reasons to be cheerful but no room for complacency.    

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The dwindling Tory party: is anybody out there?, Telegraph, 21 September 2013

Posted on September 22, 2013 by tpbale

David Cameron’s enemies have been quick to pounce on figures which suggest that the Conservative Party’s membership has almost halved since he took over as Tory leader back in 2005. The drop simply proves, they argue, what they have been saying all along – that the Prime Minister is a pussy-footing metrosexual, hopelessly out of touch with the traditional views and values of his grassroots who are deserting the party in their droves, thereby rendering an unlikely outright victory in 2015 even more unlikely.

If only things were so simple. The fact that the Tories now only have 134,000 members – and many of us would like to see their detailed workings before accepting that figure as gospel – is only the latest chapter in a sorry tale that began long before the current leadership took charge.

It is undoubtedly the case that Cameron’s kind of Conservatism – socially as well as economically liberal – sticks in the craw of many members. That much is obvious from a survey of party members that I helped – in conjunction with YouGov – to conduct this year. Six out of 10 opposed legislating for gay marriage, with a similar proportion disappointed at the Government’s refusal to extend restrictions on immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania. Two-thirds wanted to scrap the ring-fence around Britain’s overseas aid spending, and over half of all members didn’t think that the leadership respected them.

Remember, though, that these people were sticking with the Conservatives, Cameron or no Cameron. Simply disagreeing with the party’s top-brass, in other words, clearly isn’t enough to prompt mass desertions. True, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that those who have departed have done so because they despaired of Cameron. But given that nearly half of current members devote no time to the party, then many former members will have slipped away silently, leaving us none the wiser as to their reasons for going.

In any case, if it were simply a case of Tory leaders giving their rank and file what they wanted – either in terms of policies blue in tooth and claw or victory after victory at the ballot box – then membership would have held up nicely under more Right-wing or electorally more successful leaders. But it didn’t. It’s been dropping ever since the mid-Fifties – a long-term trend that showed no signs of slowing even under Margaret Thatcher, surely a leader who ticked all the boxes.

The decline may appear to have accelerated recently, but that impression is exaggerated by the fact that the party now has so few members that losses seem so much worse. By the same token, it’s easy to forget that the 2.8 million members the party could boast in the early Fifties were a historical blip – the result not just of a determined post-war membership drive on the part of an exceptionally gifted, national treasure of a chairman, but also of a part-rational, part-emotional reaction among the middle classes to the threat posed to their pre-war property and privileges by a relatively radical Labour government.

While it’s possible, then, that the Prime Minister may not have done much to help, it’s unlikely that all of this is his fault. David Cameron, no less than every single one of his predecessors as Tory leader since Winston Churchill, is swimming against a tide that seems unlikely ever to turn.

Even a cursory glance through the party’s archive in Oxford’s Bodleian Library soon reveals that its falling membership, and the growing reluctance to turn up for anything on the part of those who did carry on paying their subs, have been bemoaned by its bureaucrats and bigwigs for over half a century now – all to no avail.

Clearly, some of the reasons why the Conservative Party finds it more difficult to recruit and retain members are by no means unique. Indeed, not only are Labour and the Lib Dems in similar trouble but so are mainstream parties all over the developed world. Admittedly, the UK, where only around 1 per cent of the population is a member of a political party and which has seen that proportion drop by two-thirds over the past 30 years, seems to be in slightly more trouble than most. But it may just be leading the way where others are bound to follow.

To some extent, parties only have themselves to blame. For a long time, convinced that campaigns could no longer be won locally and on the ground but had to be fought nationally and on the air, they may have regretted the passing of mass membership. But they didn’t really regard it as a tragedy – especially since they could more than make up for lost subscriptions by soliciting donations and state funding. Indeed, between 2005 and 2009 the former (along with legacies) made up 59 per cent of Conservative Party income and the latter 15 per cent; membership fees accounted for just 3 per cent.

By the time tougher legal regulation began to impact seriously on donations and spending, and by the time that academic research began to suggest that local effort could pay off at elections, it was simply too late. The ship had sailed – although some brave souls, including Tory chairman Grant Shapps, argue that social media, “big data” and a more fluid definition of what constitutes membership can somehow compensate.

But it takes two to tango, or rather to break off the dance. In the immediate post-war period, parties helped us do things that we can now do in other, probably better, ways. Belonging to a party – particularly, some would say, the Conservative Party – used to be a precious way of staving off suburban boredom, especially for non-working women, and meeting not only people of like-mind but also of the opposite sex.

Television, the Swinging Sixties, and women’s entry into the labour force put an end to that, and, while free time is under pressure, opportunities for leisure (and pleasure) have expanded massively ever since. So, too, have opportunities to express ourselves politically on single issues and through new technologies, some of which only reinforce our contemporary fear of potentially dull and demanding commitments.

And then there is class. In an age where there was so much less stuff, belonging to the Tory party used to be a quick and convenient way of badging oneself as having made it, or at least wanting to. Over the decades, that has become so much easier to do by conspicuous consumption – the cars we drive, the holidays we take, the magazines we buy, even the food we eat and the drinks we drink. Even if they weren’t toxic, as brands, parties simply cannot compete.

Moreover, the rewards of loyalty to those brands, especially when one is paying for the privilege, now seem laughably limited. Sure, Tory members still get to select parliamentary candidates, and even the party’s leader, every so often. But they have no say in deciding policy. That may not have mattered much in more deferential decades gone by but it rankles now we’re routinely asked for our opinion about almost everything else we buy or belong to.

Maybe, then, instead of worrying about why people are abandoning the party, Tories – whether they be friends or enemies of Mr Cameron – should ask why anyone who doesn’t harbour political ambitions would bother joining in the first place.

 

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‘Can a party conference change politics: the Conservative view’, from Total Politics, 11 September 2013

Posted on September 14, 2013 by tpbale

Although they can seem awfully important at the time, especially to those who’ve been sweating over their speeches all summer, most party conferences, like the opinion poll bounces they sometimes occasion, fade from the memory very quickly. There are, however, some honourable exceptions – years that have provided high drama and even made a real difference.

In a top-down organisation like the Tory Party, there’s little expectation that its annual gathering can make much difference to policy. After all, it was one of its own leaders, Arthur Balfour, who famously remarked that he’d sooner listen to the opinions of his valet than those of the Conservative Party Conference. Yet there has been the odd exception that proves the rule.

Perhaps the most famous was in 1950, when calls from the floor led the leadership to promise to build 300,000 houses a year, a commitment Churchill thought unwise until Macmillan managed to deliver on it in the early 1950s, thereby cementing a growing reputation that eventually helped him win the top spot. And, although they’ve been few and far between, votes taken at party conference may once or twice have pushed the leadership into taking a tougher line than it might otherwise have adopted, the one held after a heated debate on immigration in 1969 being an obvious case in point. That said, various home and shadow home secretaries have been subjected sometimes to vituperative criticism from the floor over their refusal to restore hanging and flogging, but all of them resisted those siren calls.

In the end, and perhaps fittingly, the biggest impact of conference for the Tories has been on leadership rather than policy. There have been two years – 1963 and 2005 – which turned into beauty contests between rival candidates and where reputations were won (Alec Home and David Cameron) and lost (Rab Butler, Lord Hailsham and David Davis). Meanwhile, it was Iain Duncan Smith’s woeful performance at the 2003 conference – “the quiet man is here to stay and he’s turning up the volume!” – which, notwithstanding 17 stage-managed standing ovations, finally helped to trigger his removal.

Turns out, then, that all that time spent slaving away over your speech during the summer may not be wasted after all. “You turn if you want to” told voters that Margaret Thatcher was going to stay the course. “Let me take you on a journey to a foreign land” made it clear that William Hague had finally abandoned all thoughts of a fresh start. And in 2007, Cameron’s “So, Mr Brown, what’s it going to be? You go ahead and call that election…We will fight, Britain will win” went a long way – along, of course, with George Osborne’s announcement on inheritance tax at the same conference – to persuade Brown to bottle it, thereby blowing Labour’s best and only chance to win after Blair’s departure. The rest, as they say, is history…

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Don’t believe the Hysteria: Britain’s role hasn’t diminished overnight, Observer, 1 September 2013

Posted on September 3, 2013 by tpbale

According to some, Britain woke up a different country on Friday morning. But how much has really changed? Of course what happened matters, both in terms of democracy at home and the part we play in the world. But the government’s defeat is part of a much longer, occasionally painful process of adjustment whose outcomes are by no means as clear cut as some suggest.

For years, despite its claim to be “the mother of parliaments”, Britain stood out as having one of the weakest legislatures in western Europe, the paucity of its powers vis-à-vis the executive rivalled only by France’s notoriously impotent assemblée nationale. The desire to do something about that situation, however, has been growing for decades, and led, at last, to the Wright committee reforms. That some of its proposals to give MPs greater control over how Westminster works were eventually allowed to emerge was primarily down to Gordon Brown’s deep-seated desperation to distinguish himself from Tony Blair.

But it also had more than a little to do with the fact that David Cameronwas equally concerned to come over as a breath of fresh air to voters grown tired of government that didn’t seem to listen – a desire that also led him to run (or at least flirt) with Brown’s idea of slimming down some of the crown’s prerogative powers, up to and including the untrammelled freedom to commit the country to military action.

Blair himself had implicitly conceded the principle back in 2003, in agreeing to put the invasion of Iraq to a vote. And Cameron’s decision to repeat the exercise on Libya effectively turned it into a convention, in so doing adding in time-honoured tradition to myriad unwritten rules that make up this country’s famously uncodified constitution.

Still, it is one thing for a parliament to believe it has the power to do something, quite another to discover –as it did on Thursday night – that it can actually do it. That much at least has changed, and changed irrevocably.

Whether, however, refusing permission for military action will become parliament’s default setting is surely more of a moot point. Thursday’s vote, after all, was on a specific motion about a specific country at a specific time – not a rejection of the principle of a British government deploying military force, or even of deploying it in concert with the US. It may well be that politicians will now have to work much harder than an initially complacent Cameron did to convince people that military action makes practical as well as moral sense. If so, however, Thursday’s vote is far more a symptom than a cause of the new normal.

As for the idea that the government’s defeat somehow spells the end of the UK’s special relationship with America, where does one start? For one thing, that relationship has survived possibly even greater strains before. Was Obama more outraged by Cameron’s withdrawal than Lyndon Johnson was by Harold Wilson’s refusal to help out in Vietnam or Richard Nixon was by Ted Heath’s reluctance to side unequivocally with Israel during the Yom Kippur war? This notion looks especially wrongheaded after Obama’s decision to consult Congress before any action.

For another, as the Edward Snowden affair has recently reminded us, the special relationship is based on day-in-day-out intelligence co-operation that counts far more than whether the UK fires off a few missiles to lend legitimacy to what was always going to be an essentially American operation.Indeed, such is the scale and scope of co-operation between London and Washington that it is difficult to believe, if an attack does go ahead, that British assets will have played no part whatsoever in its planning, if not its delivery. In any case, given the apparent willingness of other EU member states to play a more visible role than the UK in any such operation, and given the fervent Euroscepticism of some of the Tory rebels, it can hardly be that Thursday’s vote represents a long-overdue recognition that this country’s future lies more with its continental partners than its transatlantic cousins.

Our post-imperial illusions on that score, as well as on the issue of how much we matter – and deserve to matter – globally, remain pretty much intact: the prime minister may have had to stay his hand on Syria but he’s a long way from facing serious pressure to admit the game’s up by throwing away Trident or our seat on the UN security council.

Even the impact on domestic party politics is likely to be rather more limited than those piling into – and piling out of – Cameron seem to think. No one, not even those who argue that there may be some mileage in the idea that the PM can at least claim to have listened to parliament and public opinion, is arguing that Thursday night’s defeat was anything other than a humiliation. Yet the Tories are likely to stick with their tarnished leader, even if only faute de mieux.

Nick Clegg’s pro-war stance may well have ended any lingering hope that all those Lib Dem voters who switched to Labour might one day drift back. But even those Labour people who believe that Ed Miliband has basically played a blinder over Syria probably don’t hold out too much hope that what has happened will do any more than, say, his deft handling of Hackgate a couple of years back, to boost his personal or his party’s popularity among floating voters in marginal seats.

Thursday night’s vote, then, has not so much changed things utterly as dramatised developments and dilemmas that have been going on for years and will continue to play out for decades to come. Britain, however infuriatingly, is still the same country.

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Gove or May as Tory leader? No, Boris is still the grassroots’ favourite – and by a country mile, Telegraph, 2 August 2013

Posted on August 4, 2013 by tpbale

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So welcome to the silly season – sun, sea, sand, and speculation.

But when three of the best-informed political commentators around all write columns on the same theme in the same week talking about pretty much the same thing, we should probably sit up and pay attention.

Matthew d’Ancona kicked things off with a column on Boris Johnson’s still burning ambition to be Prime Minister, should David Cameron have to step down soon after the next general election.

The Spectator’s James Forsyth, who like d’Ancona believes that “a Boris-free contest” would only mean that “the eventual winner would be dogged by doubts as to his or her legitimacy and speculation about what the blond one would do next”, goes on to suggest that, if it really is true that Michael Gove isn’t interested in taking over from Cameron, then George Osborne (whose reputation is recovering along with the economy) “might be better placed in this leadership marathon than the pundits realise”. That said, he notes, “it is not the fellow Bullingdon boy who worries Boris, but the vicar’s daughter, Theresa [May].”

The Home Secretary’s chances are also talked of, if not up, by Paul Goodman, who as well as joining the debate about how Boris might or might not manage a leadership bid in or after 2015, also outlinesConservativeHome’s polling on who the Tory grassroots would like to see come after Cameron. Osborne didn’t really feature, but the gap between the front-runner, Johnson (on 21 per cent), and Gove, the supposed non-runner (on 20 per cent) was tiny, with both reasonably closely followed by May (on 16.5 per cent).

Our academic survey of the Tory rank-and-file, carried out for us byYouGov and funded by the McDougall Trust, paints a very different – and much clearer – picture. While it shows that six out of ten grassroots members believe David Cameron should resign should he fail to hang on to No 10 in 2015, it also suggests that there is in fact a much bigger gap between the various runners and riders.

If the 852 members we questioned are anything to go by, Boris Johnson is way out in front, with 38 per cent of first preferences – double the number given to Theresa May (18 per cent), who isn’t that far ahead of Michael Gove (on 13 per cent). The suggestion that George Osborne may be in with a chance is by no means far-fetched – but he will have to make up a lot of ground: just 3 per cent of party members gave him their first preference. That was less than the 8 per cent gained by Philip Hammond, who has also been reported as being “on manoeuvres”, although it was still better than the mere 1 per cent afforded to the apparently ambitious Adam Afriyie.

Because we asked our members a wide range of questions about their backgrounds and their views, we can also say something about where the various runners and riders draw their support from. Demographically there are few surprises. Boris not only goes down particularly well in London, but does better than the rest among younger members – although, given the fact that most of the membership is getting on a bit, this is probably no great cause for celebration.

For her part, Theresa May – perhaps predictably – picks up disproportionate support among the party’s female members, although, again, this shouldn’t set the Champagne corks popping too soon, since (according to our figures anyway) women make up only a third of the membership. By the same token, the fact that May draws rather more support from the one in five of the party’s membership that isn’t thoroughly middle-class probably won’t do her much good either. That said, she might take some comfort from the fact that, while her support among Telegraph readers is far less convincing than that accorded to their stand-out favourites, Johnson and Gove, she beats them hands down when it comes to readers of the Mail – the very paper with whom she chose this week to share the story of her “shocking illness”. Even better, all this hints at the possibility that a May-led Tory party may attract more support among women and the electorally-precious C2s.

Michael Gove, on the other hand, appears on our figures to be very much a man for the solidly middle-class, whereas George Osborne actually does much better than most (including May) among the party’s tiny band of working-class voters. Gove’s supporters are also more Right-wing than supporters of the other candidates, while Osborne’s – for all that he is the “Austerity Chancellor” – are more centrist with regard to both economic and social/cultural issues.

The fact that the Chancellor’s small band of supporters is drawn disproportionately from the more centrist and less well-heeled members of the Party could well be a problem for him since neither group is well represented in the rank-and-file. But his biggest challenge is that he does best among those members who see themselves as ideologically closest to David Cameron. If the PM chooses or is obliged to step down at the next election, the grassroots will almost certainly want someone as unlike him as possible. In which case – ideologically speaking (at least in terms of perception if not reality) – step forward Michael Gove, current darling (according to our figures anyway) of the rank-and-file Right.

But the man to beat – at least as far as the grassroots are concerned – remains, by a long chalk, Boris Johnson. Whether they ever get the chance to vote for him, of course, is another matter.

 

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Five things you may think you know about the Conservative grassroots but actually probably don’t, Ballots and Bullets, 24 July 2013

Posted on July 24, 2013 by tpbale

The problem with doing any kind of social science is that the data you collect end up confirming what people already assume is the case. This is not bad in itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong in providing empirical evidence for something that, up to that point anyway, was merely unproven common wisdom. But it doesn’t make for great telly – or radio or press or even blogs. No-one, after all, wants to fail the proverbial No Shit Sherlock test.

Our recent survey of 852 rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party, conducted for us by YouGov and funded by the McDougall Trustturns out, predictably enough, to tell us some stuff we probably could have guessed at and other stuff that is slightly more surprising. Sometimes things that fall into the former category are actually pretty important. Sometimes things that fall into the latter are kind of fun, but hardly earth-shattering. Sometimes it’s not until you do the statistical analysis that you can tell the difference.

We’re not going to do that analysis here – something which, no doubt, some readers will be relieved to learn. For those who aren’t, some initial forays have already made their way into the media here,here and here. And some serious number-crunching is going into a suitably pointy-headed paper we’re going to be delivering at theAmerican Political  Science Association’s meeting in Chicago at the end of August.

Instead we thought we’d pick out five more or less random findings that contradict or at least qualify the common wisdom about the Conservative grassroots. So here goes:

1. The Tory rank-and-file are a bunch of middle class old duffers who, when it comes to candidate selection, like to pick a typical Tory boy – public school, Oxbridge, and the rest.

Not quite. Grassroots Conservatives may indeed be ‘of a certain age’ – the average for our respondents was 59. And they are certainly overwhelmingly middle class. However, they are rather more open minded about candidates than many imagine. When we asked members about female MPs, 52% of them said they’d like to see more and only 2% said they’d like to see fewer, with the rest thinking the number was about right (24%) or not caring either way (22%). Even more interestingly, and chiming nicely with the work of Nottingham’s own Philip Cowley, when we asked them about MPs from working class or lower middle class backgrounds, 53% would like to see more and only 3% less, with the figures for those who were satisfied with the current number or not caring either way standing at 24% and 18% respectively.

2. Grassroots Conservatives are rabid right-wingers.

In fact, it all depends what you mean by right-wing. Our findings suggest that it’s important to distinguish between social conservatism and attitudes to the state and the market. The former – typified by current ambivalence or outright hostility to gay marriage – is pretty widespread, although there are some libertarians at the grassroots, including, perhaps, the third of members who don’t believe moral standards need to be upheld by censorship of films and magazines. On the economy and public services, however, we need to be a bit more careful. Between a fifth and a quarter of rank and file Tory members believe, for example, that big business benefits owners at the expense of workers, that ordinary people don’t get a fair share of the nation’s wealth and that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor. Moreover, especially where their own interests or those of their families are directly affected, grassroots Conservatives suddenly see a role for the state: while there is widespread support for spending cuts, less than half of rank and file members support the rise in university tuition fees, while more than half of them don’t want to see cuts made to the NHS.

3. The Tory rank-and-file are irredeemably opposed to immigration in all its forms.

No they aren’t, actually. As you may have seen reported in the media, we discovered that a significant minority of Tory members are tempted by UKIP – a party whose anti-immigration platform is a big part of their appeal. Indeed, while 66% of grassroots Conservatives say they would never vote for their coalition partners, the Lib Dems, in a general election, only 33% of them say the same about Nigel Farage’s outfit. However, as is the case for many of their fellow countrymen and women, rank-and-file Tory members’ views on immigration are actually rather more nuanced than many would imagine. True, a quarter of them (26%) would like to see an immediate cessation of immigration from inside or outside the EU. But that figure is dwarfed by the two-thirds of them (67%) who are happy for the government to allow people to come and live in the UK as long as they have a job or some other means of financial support.

4. The C of E might not be ‘the Tory Party at prayer’ any more but loads of grassroots Conservatives are pillars of their local churches.

Not really. While 15% claim to attend a religious service at least once a week – which is probably higher  than (maybe even double) the national average – a quarter (25%) go less than once a month and half (49%) practically never go, except maybe for weddings and funerals. That’s about the same for the population as a whole.

5. When they’re not hanging out at church, hordes of rank-and-file Tories are to be found gracing the golf courses of Great Britain.

Wrong. Turns out that only a disappointing 8% of Conservative Party members belong to a golf club: 11% of the men and 3% of the women. Whether more of the latter would belong if they could but are excluded by courses which don’t admit women, we don’t know. What we do know is that in the twenty-first century more than twice as many grassroots Tories (17% of them in fact) go the gym than play golf.

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Another coalition after 2015? The Tory grassroots can’t bear the thought, Telegraph, 17 July 2003

Posted on July 18, 2013 by tpbale

An overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Conservatives wish David Cameron had never taken them into coalition with the Lib Dems back in May 2010. But that doesn’t mean that they’ll stop him doing exactly the same thing after the next election – not if that’s what it takes to keep a Tory Prime Minister in No 10.

In a comprehensive survey of 852 Conservative Party members funded by the McDougall Trust and carried out for us last month by YouGov, we asked “Had you known in May 2010 what you know now about how the Coalition has worked and what it has achieved, which of the following options would you have supported: the coalition with the Lib Dems, a minority Conservative government, or an immediate second general election?”

The answers we got back point not just to mild disaffection but to far-reaching disappointment and discontent with the coalition at the Tory grassroots.

With the benefit of hindsight, Only 33 per cent of grassroots Conservatives say that a Cameron-Clegg government was the right way to go. Some 41 per cent would have preferred a minority Tory government to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, while a further 24 per cent would rather have seen an immediate second general election called in May 2010. In other words, two thirds of ordinary Tory members, knowing what they know now about how things have worked out, would have preferred David Cameron not to have done the deal he did.

If we dig a little bit further, things look even more depressing for the Prime Minister – at least at first glance.

For one thing, it’s clear that rank and file distaste for coalition isn’t driven by demographics or length of service. There aren’t many youngsters around in the Tory Party – the average age of its members is 59 – but they are no more likely to favour coalition than the old-timers. Instead, the membership’s dislike of the coalition appears to be driven not just by policy concerns but by an underlying feeling that the leadership has no respect for them and that Mr Cameron in particular is too much of a centrist for their taste. Worse still, hardcore activists – the 3 per cent of the membership who work more than 40 hours a month for the Party and who will presumably form the backbone of its ground campaign – are more disaffected than the largely passive majority.

For another, few grassroots members are keen, at least on the face of it, to repeat the coalition experience. We asked them to rank their preferences with regard to the outcome of the next election. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority would like to see an overall Conservative majority, even if very few of them – in fact, only 19 per cent of them – see it as the most likely outcome in 2015.

Given the distinct possibility of another hung parliament, however, it is members’ second preferences that should interest us most. If we look at those, then a minority Tory government is the second choice of 59 per cent of the rank-and-file. Perhaps predictably, it’s a more popular option among those who regret going into coalition than it is among those who don’t. Equally predictably, but even more definitively, only 4 per cent of those who would have preferred Cameron to have avoided jumping into bed with Clegg in 2010 put down a Con-Lib coalition as their second choice for 2015.

What’s more surprising, however, is that even most of those who are keen on the current coalition would turn down the chance to do it all again if there were some other way of holding on to power. A renewal of the current arrangement in 2015 turns out to be the second choice of just 30% of those who are glad that the Party went into coalition back in 2010. Contrast that with the 44% of the self-same group who say a minority government is their second choice.

In fact, if we return to members as a whole, giving coalition another whirl is the second choice of a mere 13 per cent of the Tory grassroots. This makes it not only four times less popular as a second choice than minority government but also slightly less popular (5 percentage points less popular, to be exact) than a coalition with other smaller parties – presumably assorted nationalists, unionists and (who knows?) the odd Ukipper.

On the face of it, then, this presents a serious problem for David Cameron. Unless he hangs onto No 10 in 2015, he is toast – certainly as far as the grassroots are concerned: less than a third of them think he should stay on as leader if the Tories aren’t still in government after the next election. Yet another coalition with Clegg, or whoever succeeds him, could be the only way ensuring that the Conservative Party remains in office.

Fortunately for the Prime Minister, our survey also shows hope is at hand. The chances of him managing to win over his disaffected followers by miraculously transforming himself into a credible social Conservative in the 21 months remaining before the next election are vanishingly small. What he can rely on, however, is their continuing will to power.

Faced with a straight choice between losing office and returning to opposition or else doing another deal with the Lib Dems, it turns out that a comfortable majority of rank-and-file Tories – including over two thirds of those who wish Cameron had never teamed up with Clegg in the first place – would do it all over again. Pragmatism, it seems, trumps ideology in the end.

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