Cameron must unite the country today – or Miliband has won conference season

This year’s Tory conference has been a strange event – curiously inward looking for a party of government just half way through their first term. George Osborne’s speech in particular was as clear a rallying cry as I have ever heard from a conference podium, aimed square at the party faithful. He even had to explicitly make the argument that being in government is better than being in opposition – somewhere it took Labour 11 years, two wars and a financial crisis to get to.

Not an auspicious sign for the Tory Party.

So Cameron may today be tempted to follow his ministers and make a speech that unites his fractious party. That certainly looks to have been his over-riding concern in recent weeks. The Britannia Unchained mob are snapping at his heels, the old Tory Right are on manoEUvres, and the modernisers are quickly hiding any semblance of Cameroonian instinct incase it should see them first up against the wall in the post-Dave days.

It would be understandable to reach for party unity today. Yet the task for Cameron is far greater than that. Ed Miliband raised the conference season bar last week – he must unite the country.

Of course it is easier to make soaring rhetorical speeches – and do clever stunts like a no notes speech – in opposition, than it is in government. But Miliband’s style shouldn’t obscure his substance. The “One Nation” rhetoric certainly didn’t go unnoticed by the Tory leadership, who have spent all week attacking Miliband for using it. But they’ve failed to articulate a genuine notion of what their version of One Nation would look like. In reality it looks like they’re not even trying. They look like they are not unhappy with the idea of two nations. Some – those Rowenna David has called the Tories the Left should be frightened of – seem to understand this. Thankfully for us (if not for the country at large), they are isolated, marginalised and ignored in the modern Tory Party.

The quandry that the Tory Party faces is that much of what they are trying to do – rapid cutting of the deficit, welfare cuts, immigration cuts – poll quite well with the British public at large. Therefore there has been a temptation in the past to shout louder into the megaphone in the mistaken belief that people didn’t hear them properly the first time. The shouting then has the impact of reinforcing the “nasty party” image which Theresa May remarked on a decade ago – yet which many in her own party never truly heeded. Megaphone politics is superficially attractive ,but at its core it’s a retoxification strategy writ large – and it’s about motivating the third of the British public who are passionate Tories – and sod the rest.

If Cameron does this today he’ll have handed Miliband a comfortable conference season victory. Yet the early indications are that the speech – rather than reaching for the optimism that might unite and win over the British public to his austere vision of the future – will instead strive for fear, telling the nation that:

“Unless we act, unless we take difficult, painful decisions, unless we show determination and imagination, Britain may not be in the future what it has been in the past.

“Because the truth is this: We are in a global race today and that means an hour of reckoning for countries like ours; sink or swim; do or decline.”

He’ll also tell us that Britain is still the greatest country on earth – but I suspect that the focus will be on the impending, painful and as yet non-specific apocalypse Cameron plans to outline, rather than a few references to the Olympics (which are becoming somewhat passe in conference season now). Whilst Miliband’s speech was all sunlit uplands and the promise of a better Britain – a speech of hope and renewal in the best traditions of the country – Cameron’s looks set to be one of fear, decline and fear of decline. Miliband suggested that Britain’s greatest days were yet to come. Cameron frets that we will fall from our pedestal.

Of course, their ideas of a “Great” Britain are far apart. Their different measurements allow them to take opposing views with the same facts in front of them. But that doesn’t stop this from being  very dangerous position for the Prime Minister to be in. No-one ever wants to be a pessimistic and fearful incumbent facing an energised and optimistic opponent. Yet that looks to be exactly where David Cameron will find himself at the end of conference season 2012. And that’s the kind of thing that can set the narrative for a whole year.