On being nasty…

By Hopi Sen / @HopiSen

So David Cameron is to launch a highly personal attack on Gordon Brown over expenses.

Aside from the obvious point (that I think Cameron’s wrong) I have three problems with this, from a political strategy and tactics point of view.

First, it undermines David Cameron’s carefully constructed “nice” image. Cameron sometimes does this at PMQs and it makes him look sneering – and sometimes even braying. That’s OK in PMQs, but doesn’t work on its own. Cameron is supposed to be about a new politics. This feels like the same old mud wrestling.

Second, It comes after a relatively bad couple of weeks for the Tories, so this looks more like lashing out than considered assault. A personal attack also allows Labour to respond with high-minded disgust, and given that no party emerges well from expenses, it’s dodgy ground to fight on.

Finally, the general rule is for the leader to set out the positive vision, and for someone else to do the man marking. It’s like the difference between a centre forward and a centre back*. Why not let Grieve, or Osborne, or Grayling do the crunching tackle, then let Cameron run up the field with the ball? Doesn’t he trust them to get the job done?

Anyway, I don’t think this area is a profitable one for partisan attack anyway. The whole point about the perception of modern politics is that “they’re all in it for themselves”. Trying to use the scandal for party advantage, when so many of each party are implicated re-enforces that message. Far better to try to be high-minded.

In that sense, Nick Clegg is probably getting the tone, if not the policy, right (and Harriet Harman did pretty well on the Today programme too).

* I should say that this is rather different from the sort of briefing that comprised l’affair McBride (and lots of other stuff from all sides that we don’t know about). That’s more like a pitch invasion, and much further from the way to play the game.

This post was also published on Hopi’s Blog.

Tagged in: People, Opposition, Election2010.