TELEGRAPH 28.5.09
David Cameron will need a scowl and a hatchet to stop us going bust
The country doesn't have a vacancy for a nice guy - it needs a ruthless leader with a sense of urgency, argues Fraser Nelson.
By Fraser Nelson
David Cameron's scowl is coming on nicely. For weeks, he has never left home without it. Whether stepping into his car or the television studio he has been careful to suppress his jovial instincts and instead project anger and determination. Times have changed, and so we are witnessing a leader mid-mutation. The smiling Cameron's role was to detoxify the Tory brand, and seduce wavering voters. The stern- faced Cameron must persuade people that he is a man with enough resolve and ruthlessness to save the country.
It has not taken him long to find his inner brute. Take, for example, the four Tory MPs whose careers have been brought to a premature end over the expenses fiasco. When asked, Mr Cameron says – with just a hint of malice – that he had "a conversation" with them. It may not be long before others are treated to a similar chat.
It is all good practice. For if he is elected into office the Tory leader will be having "a conversation" with the Treasury about the implementation of radical spending cuts across education, policing and defence.
Very little, in fact, remains of the original Cameroon mission. It was forged in the days when serious people argued that Gordon Brown had somehow been a wise Chancellor. To challenge his orthodoxy with talk of cuts, it seemed, was a recipe for electoral defeat. It was time to change the message and (as George Osborne liked to say) "educate the party", so activists would stop focusing on the level of state spending. Now, both leadership and activists are resolved to making the sharpest cuts attempted by any post-war government.
For a party to change mission like this without changing leadership is a remarkable feat, and it highlights one of Mr Cameron's greatest skills: his versatility. He demonstrated this at the 2007 party conference in Blackpool, where he proposed inheritance tax cuts, Wisconsin-style welfare reform and Swedish-style school reform in the space of a week. It stunned Gordon Brown into cancelling the election, and laid down a marker. Should events change again, Mr Cameron is more than capable of shifting with them.
As the economic outlook blackens, it is horribly clear to Mr Cameron that his destiny is to be hated. While no announcements have been made, the Tory plan is for a 10 per cent reduction in spending across education, defence, home office and transport. If the national debt is to be reduced, as Mr Cameron is promising, then his austerity agenda will have to go far deeper, with the NHS budget being downsized and the public sector pensions overhauled. Herds of sacred cows will have to be led to the slaughterhouse.
It does not take much political imagination to work out what the response will be. There will be teachers and nurses protesting in the streets, holding effigies of men dressed in Bullingdon tailcoats. The unions will devote their energies to forcing Cameron into a Heath- style U-turn. Government, for the Tories, could well turn into one long, painful battle.
It will be a war of nerves, and it starts now. Mr Cameron needs to project resolve, because any hint of weakness will invite chaos. If the unions regard him as a soft touch who will crumble if enough teachers chain themselves to enough school gates, they will deploy the full theatrics. The public will be more sympathetic, but only if the Conservatives level with them beforehand. If a cuts agenda is sprung on voters as a nasty surprise, then punishment will come at the ballot box.
All this explains the recent ratcheting up of language and promises about how Mr Cameron intends to fundamentally redesign politics. It is the only possible narrative to explain the harsh spending decisions he will have to make – that politics has failed, and therefore he is re-engineering the whole system. This will mean more than sending people text messages to inform them of the passage of the Finance Bill. It will mean dissolving empires of bureaucracies and transferring power back to people by spending a lot less of their money.
We have, of course, heard before from a charismatic young leader intent on renewing Britain's democracy. In the mid 1990s Tony Blair was full of similar promises, talking excitedly about constitutional reform and, for example, overhauling welfare. Doubtless, in opposition, he meant it. But even with a landslide majority, Mr Blair accomplished almost nothing. "Tony had the option of an easy route," a Blairite privy counsellor tells me. "Cameron will have a gun to his head. If he doesn't cut state spending, Britain goes bust."
This is the crucial difference. Given the choice, Mr Cameron probably would salvage as much of Plan A as he could and continue to increase spending (he suggested as much only two months ago in Cardiff). But this option has been removed. The credit ratings agencies are demanding that Britain's debt starts to fall – and this can only mean brutal cuts. If they are not satisfied, the country's AAA status could be revoked, the cost of borrowing will soar and the public finances will tip over the precipice.
So Mr Cameron has the rhetoric. He has the incentive: if he is forced into the arms of the IMF, his government will be judged a failure. What he lacks are the policies, and the sense of urgency.
Internal Tory discussions still talk about five-year horizons – a relic from the Gordon Brown days where plans for 2020 were discussed with a straight face. Reagan turned around America in four years; Britain won a world war in less than six. Cameron needs that kind of ambition. The most heartening analogy I have heard is from one shadow minister who thinks his job will be so torrid that he is unlikely to survive very long. So best be radical, he said, play each day like it was your last. "England played the worst cricket in the late Eighties, always playing not to lose," he explained. "We could be the same. But if we play defensively, not to lose the next election, we'll achieve nothing." This is precisely the right attitude. There can be no autopilot when the aircraft is in a nosedive.
In many ways, Cameron faces a task far harder than that which confronted Margaret Thatcher. She was elected three years after the IMF bailout, and so the public finances were being restored to health. She was chosen as leader specifically to bring radical change, and had four years to assemble a team and prepare for the ordeal. Mr Cameron originally assembled a team for the political equivalent of a game of croquet; the same people now find themselves dropped on a rugby pitch.
Britain no longer has a vacancy for a nice guy. And, unfortunately for Mr Brown, no vacancy for someone whose economic policies have led us to disaster. Something else is needed: someone with a sense of mission and urgency. Someone who can explain why cuts, however painful, are better than the alternative. So we had best get used to David Cameron's new scowl. It is perhaps cruel and unfair, but it is true none the less: the only tool worth using when he makes it through the door of Number 10 is a hatchet. Whether he likes it or not, Mr Cameron will be judged on how effectively he wields that axe.
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Fraser Nelson is political editor of 'The Spectator'
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