The Tories’ tails are up: time to chop them down to size

The Paul Richards Column

I am sending this dispatch from deep behind enemy lines: the Novotel in Dickinson Street, Manchester, just outside the secure zone of the Conservatives’ conference.

I am here to address a fringe meeting organised by Cameron’s favourite think-tank Policy Exchange. I am sharing a platform with Pauline Neville Jones, the former head of the security service, Charles Moore from the Telegraph, Paul Goodman MP and Maajid Nawaz, the Director of the Quilliam Foundation, who served a prison term in Egypt for being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and has since renounced Islamism.

Chris Grayling has just told the conference that he too will will ban Hizb ut-Tahrir. This has been Tory policy for ages. You may recall Cameron wrong-footed Gordon Brown at his first-ever PMQs with a question on why the government had not got round to proscribing Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Brown complained that he only been in the job a couple of days.

We had an interesting discussion about counter-extremism, tackling radicalisation amongst Britain’s Muslims, and the progress of the Contest strategy which is Labour’s approach to defeating terrorism, and which Pauline Neville-Jones has said will form the framework of the Tories’ approach if they form the next government.

If they form the next government. From the demeanour of the Tories buzzing around their fringe meetings, it is clear they think it a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. They exude a quiet confidence, like the smug kids at school who walked away from exam halls knowing they’d passed.

They’re not falling into the trap of arrogance. Champagne is banned. I had hoped that they would do a ‘Sheffield’ and turn their conference into a triumphalist rally, with ugly scenes of Tory boys and girls prematurely celebrating an election win which is far from being in the bag. But Osborne’s speech set a sombre, business-like tone. Everyone’s calling it his greatest gamble. Vote Tory and work longer for less pay seems to be the headline. It will make an interesting pledge card:

* Lower pay for public servants

* Work longer than you planned to

* A smaller pension

* Cuts to local services

* And end to child trust funds

VOTE CONSERVATIVE.

Osborne’s tactic is pure Steve Hilton: take the negatives and neutralise them. We thought we were onto a winner with the ‘boy George’ line. A boy sent to do a man’s job. So by making a speech filled with tough messages, gloomy predictions and foul-tasting economic medicine, and refusing even to smile at the end, ‘Boy’ George becomes a serious figure, whose announcements might affect millions of taxpayers.

His speech has gone down well at the conference, despite the notable absence of pre-election baubles or trinkets. Osborne is the tooth-fairy who leaves, not cash, but a pamphlet on oral hygiene. He’s Father Christmas who comes down the chimney and throws a bucket of cold water over you. The Easter Bunny who stamps on your foot. You get the idea.

So where does the road from Manchester lead? We must be ready to fight the election on 6th May 2010 behind in the opinion polls, with a media engaged in the worst kind of ‘group think’ as to who will win, and with little or no money for new party staff, campaign materials, or billboards. This means that instead of a mighty national campaign sweeping all before us as in 1997, when the efforts of local candidates were insignificant compared to the impact of the national campaign, 2010 will be a battle of local candidates. Here we have an advantage: with our parliamentary selections nearly finished, and a strong combination of battle-hardened MPs and energetic PPCs in the seats that matter, we can run effective local campaigns.

I debated against Shaun Bailey, the Tories’ hopeful for Hammersmith a couple of weeks ago. He was all over the place. He said that if he was a minister he would appoint his mother as a special adviser, which is naive to the point of just plain daft. He seemed to have no idea what the job of MP involved or how parliament worked. Even someone making a virtue of being an outsider should spend some time finding out the basics, surely?

In the fringe meeting on tackling extremism, Shailesh Parekh, the Tory candidate for Birmingham Hodge Hill popped up. He was less than impressive too. If you go to the Conservative Party website page about him, there is absolutely no information about him whatsoever; just a big blank page.

I get the sense that the Tories rushed to select candidates from a range of diverse backgrounds, but failed to do much due diligence as to what their skills were and whether they could hack a general election campaign. And they did it over the heads of experienced Conservative councillors and former MPs who would present us with a much greater challenge.

So it’s six months’ hard pounding in the key seats. There’ll be no cavalry coming over the hill. No angels on our shoulders. Just the prospect of a hard slog through the winter and into the sunlight of Spring.