Tories Get Toff

For nearly two centuries, between 1800 and 1997, all but one of the leaders of the world’s oldest and most successful political party served also as Britain’s prime minister. The list of Tory leaders for most of that time reads like a roll call of some of the world’s great statesmen: William Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill.

In the last half century, it’s true, as Britain’s global stature has diminished, the star-power of top Tories has declined a bit too. And yet, even in these quieter years, the party managed to churn out a giant in Margaret Thatcher, capable of walking the world stage.

But it has been a while now since being leader of the Conservative party guaranteed you a leading role in British, let alone world, history. For the last decade Tory chiefs have played a series of essentially comical, walk-on parts in a drama written, directed, and choreographed by the Labour party of Tony Blair.

In quick succession since 1997, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard have come and gone as Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, the political equivalent of those familiar characters in London theatrical farces, always losing their trousers or falling into the orchestra pit.

So next Tuesday, when the Conservatives, still toiling in futile opposition, and still outnumbered almost two to one in the House of Commons by Labour, announce the name of their new leader, you could be forgiven for giving it a mental pass, placing it in the same category as news of the latest change in the prime-time lineup at CNN, or a shake-up in the bullpen by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

And yet there is a rare buzz of excitement this week among Britain’s luckless Tories, a quiver of sharply heightened expectations.

The man who, barring a shock of seismic proportions, will emerge next week as the winner of the two-month balloting of 300,000 Conservative party members is causing even some of the most jaded of Britain’s political observers to take a fresh look at the ravaged Tories.

Part of the reason for the new mood is that David Cameron is a rare thing in British politics–a genuinely fresh face. The exigencies of the British party system usually require a would-be party leader to serve a long apprenticeship, working his way up through the ranks. Not for Britain the potential of the U.S. primary system to throw up someone as a political leader who had scarcely been heard of on the national scene six months before.

But Cameron is as unfamiliar to the public at large as any national political leader has ever been. Fearfully young, only 39, he was elected to the House of Commons just four years ago, the shortest period between entering parliament and becoming leader of anyone in more than a century.

Cameron’s freshness has been enhanced by the suddenness of his success. Three months ago, his precocious campaign for the leadership was regarded as at best a trial run for a future bid, or at worst a bit of a joke.

The firm favorite to succeed Howard, who resigned after the Tories lost their third straight election in May, was David Davis, a solid party man of long-standing leadership ambitions.

But in the space of a week in early October, at the party’s annual conference by the sea in dreary Blackpool, Cameron impressed members with a dazzling speech that was light on detail but delivered with remarkable sure-footedness and aplomb. Davis followed with a dreary, pedestrian effort that reminded most Tory members why they had failed for the last ten years, and Cameron was suddenly unstoppable.

CAMERON IS AN UNUSUAL Conservative leader in another, rather unexpected sense. He is a frightful toff.

In the weird, upside-down, but still class-obsessed British political culture, it’s all right to be posh if you want to lead the working-class Labour party–Tony Blair went to one of the finest British private schools and Oxford.

But, for three decades now, such a background has been death for an ambitious Tory. The last three Tory prime ministers–Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major–all hailed from solid middle-class backgrounds and public education.

Cameron is a throwback to the pre-1960s Conservatives. He went to Eton, England’s grandest public school, and Oxford, where he seems to have frittered away his time getting drunk in fine dining societies, as well as tasting some of the less legal substances available to undergraduates (though that did not stop him from getting a degree with top honors).

Cameron has something else going for him. Unusually for a Conservative leader, he has been lionized by the press. Partly because he is of roughly the same generation and social background as most of the influential commentariat on what used to be called Fleet Street (he even lives in Notting Hill, famously beloved of London’s media glitterati), the pundits have fallen for him with gusto, surprisingly suspending for a moment their famous cynicism.

In his sudden ascent Cameron has cleverly leveraged his novelty and youth into a political philosophy. Arguing, with some justification, that the Tories have failed to appeal to younger voters in the last ten years in part because they have looked like an angry old bunch of malcontents forever hankering after a better yesterday, Cameron has presented a more positive, forward-looking approach.

He has in fact consciously modeled his campaign on that of George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primary. He talks enthusiastically of a “compassionate conservatism.” While he emphasizes the case for tax cuts, he reassures an electorate that still likes its public health and education by making the mantra of his public services approach: “We’re all in this together.”

In fact, his sharpest political advisers, such as George Osborne, the even younger shadow chancellor of the exchequer and a fervent admirer of America, argue that the Tories are in a similar position to the one the Republicans were in by the late 1990s–squeezed by a left of center party that has relocated itself on the center ground of politics, needing to emphasize its core values but also to look more modern and in tune with the values of most voters.

This sounds seriously overdone. The Republicans by 2000 were never in the sort of shape the Tories have been in these last 10 years–getting less than a third of the vote at successive general elections.

More plausible is the other model Cameron’s friends cite–that of Tony Blair. In 1994, after Labour had spent more than a decade in the political wilderness, the youthful new leader symbolically set about reforming it, giving it a rhetoric at least that rejected its extremist past, promising to keep taxes low, and generally making it respectable for middle-ground voters to choose Labour.

Cameron’s supporters openly emulate Blair in describing themselves as “modernizers.” They acknowledge that it was a change both in the substance of what Labour offered under Blair and in the tone and style of the man and his leading collaborators in the New Labour project that turned Labour’s fortunes around.

Blair has been so successful, in fact, that he, rather than any of the Tory failures of the last decade, has been the key reason that the Conservatives have fared so badly in the last 10 years. While presiding over steady growth in the public sector, Blair has still been able to reassure voters in Middle England that he is on their side–indeed in the last three years, it has been he, rather than the Tories, who has best articulated the case for a larger private role in the provision of public services.

AND IT IS BLAIR who has set the political framework that the new Conservative leader will try to shape to his own benefit in the next few years.

The prime minister, under pressure over the unpopular Iraq war–which, by the way, Cameron supported, though with caveats–has promised to step down before the next election, due in four years. Further political setbacks this autumn suggest Blair’s departure may come sooner rather than later. The betting from insiders at Westminster is that he’ll be gone in a year or so.

His successor, Gordon Brown, though a co-architect of New Labour with Blair, is seen as more of a traditional tax-and-spend Labourite; that is certainly the hope of the bulk of his party, for whom Blair’s enthusiasm for the market is almost as sacrilegious as his support for President Bush.

Cameron’s advisers see the next election, then, as a battle for the mantle of the soon-to-be-ex-prime minister. Whom will the British people trust more to continue to make the privatizing reforms needed for Britain’s public services, without dismantling the welfare state?

There’s something deeply depressing about all this. The campaign on which Cameron will base his bid to restore the Conservatives to power is being fought on a dramatically shrunken political battleground. He promises to use the dividends of growth, for example, for both tax cuts and increases in spending. But Britain’s bloated public sector has continued to grow under Blair. Though less stifling of free enterprise than the costly welfare states of continental Europe, the British nanny state remains well enshrined. Though the economy has done well relative to Europe in the eight years of Labour government, higher taxes and ever increasing regulation have left productivity stagnant.

With mounting demographic pressure on the public purse, the Conservatives’ offer of a pale “me too” approach to Labour’s policies looks like a lost opportunity.

Cameron’s few critics in the press ponder this and note that, before he went into politics, this bright new hope of the Conservative party had a very 21st-century occupation: He was a public relations man, and a rather good one, by all accounts. They worry that it has been precisely too much of the PR man’s skills that has damaged British politics in the last decade, and wonder whether the promise of more of the same is quite what the country needs.

But the idea of Cameron as a flack on the make seems a tad unfair. Instead another figure comes to mind. Cameron’s rapid ascent from obscurity, the near universal conviction of the media and the pundits that he is the man for the job, and his studiedly vague approach to a governing platform call to mind another man anointed as the great savior of conservative politics a few decades ago.

When George Romney’s presidential ambitions were at their peak in 1968, one astute observer commented, “The problem with George is that–deep down–he’s shallow.”

Britain’s Tories are taking a gamble this week; and they will be praying hard that their new leader does not deserve that judgment. Unlike the 1960s Republican party, the modern Conservatives can’t afford another dud.

Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.