Does Cameron actually know what he’s doing?

By David Talbot

In the autumn of 2007, a confident Labour Party met for its conference under the slogan: ‘The strength to succeed’. Solidity, reassurance, reliability and most of all competence were to be the Gordon Brown brand. His record at the treasury was the foundation on which his entire political edifice was built, and his offer to the country in an uncertain and challenging world was a safe pair of hands. Before his honeymoon turned into a nightmare, Brown won a lot of praise for his handling of the terror threats and floods in his early days at Number 10. We were, in those fevered days, preparing for an election – and then it all went so very wrong.

As inappropriate as it may now appear, it was on competence that Brown planned to fight the election that he bottled. There were genuine gasps of shock in the commons as Alistair Darling stood up and announced that HM Revenues and Customs had made the “unforgivable” error of losing the confidential data of some 25 million people. It was an error of epic proportions. It had an immediate and devastating effect on the government’s credibility with voters. Trust in Brown plummeted and never recovered. The issue over the lost tax discs went to the heart of the relationship between citizen and government; people will not trust a government if they don’t have faith in its ability to carry out even the most basic duties of governance. In politics, taking an ideological stance will always mean you lose someone. But develop a reputation for incompetence and you lose everybody.

Another week and another set of headlines about incompetence at the heart of David Cameron’s administration have left some Conservative MPs in deep frustration and members of the public rightly asking if he truly knows what he is doing. Ministerial ineptitude has become a frequent part of the major news stories in recent weeks. The evidence is there in the complete mess Cameron made of his own forestry sell-off policy, in the hapless response both he and Hague have made of over events in Libya, in the bungled announcements Gove gave last summer of which schools would and would not face the axe to their planned buildings programme – a list that had to be issued and then re-issued no fewer than four times – and Osborne’s blaming of an economic contraction on the wrong kind of snow. In fact, this government has made something of a habit of announcing u-turns. From free milk to anonymity for rape suspects, this government is for turning.

Usually the problem of creeping incompetence arises towards the end of a government’s life, when ministers are growing tired and a smell of decay is in the air. But this government is already developing a competence problem after less than a year in office. The prime minister, who has proudly boasted of being the “chairman” of the coalition, insists he retains a strong grip on all proceedings. But there isn’t just the perception of incompetence, it’s backed up by the government’s own departmental delivery plans; 43% of delivery targets were missed in February.

Appearing competent is a prerequisite for any successful government but even more so for a prime minister like David Cameron whose appeal is built, in large part, around the sense that he is a natural at the job. The Labour leadership have spotted this opportunity to enact damaging blows on the government and should exploit it to the full. The sight of the government reacting to events rather than shaping them will prompt many headlines with the word ‘incompetence’ in them. As Gordon Brown learnt, that’s a devastating word.