What yesterday really showed us about the ‘modern’ Tories

The Paul Richards column

I don’t think we learned much from David Cameron’s ‘calm down, dear’ moment in the Commons yesterday. We already knew he was a bully, a sexist, a snob and prone to temper tantrums. I had a joke during last year’s election that the only way Labour would win was if we could provoke Cameron into punching a nurse live on Sky News. Alas, Cameron remained composed, and it was our guy who lost his cool with a mic still pinned to his lapel.

What was more telling is what it says about the modern Tory party. It strongly suggests that the detoxification strategy was not an honest attempt to modernise a crusty old institution because it needed it. No, it suggests that it was driven purely by electoral motives. The need to reposition the Conservative Party was based on the necessity to meet the electorate, not because they think it right. The true face of the Tory Party is Peter Mannion MP, the old-school Tory MP in The Thick Of It, permanently bemused by instructions to take his tie off and let his shirt hang out in the pursuit of modernity.

Cameron’s edginess is a product of the precarious position he’s in. He’s the least successful Tory Prime Minister, having failed to win a general election. The bulk of his party see him as a loser: a man who couldn’t beat the Labour Party after 13 years in office, with a tone-deaf Prime Minister, and a financial crisis. His party, including many of the new intake such as Alok Sharma MP who spent much of the week attacking trade unions, are unreconstructed Thatcherites who view all the sunshine, eco, international aid stuff as utter nonsense. It’s nonsense they’ll go along with, if it wins votes, but would drop like a stone if it doesn’t.

Take climate change. Labour’s shadow minister Luciana Berger has been pointing out that it is five years since Cameron made his husky ride to see the impact of global warming on the Norwegian glaciers. It was an audacious move, given his party’s hitherto indifference to global warming. It created an eye-catching photo-opportunity: Cameron as Captain Scott, with his Tory sidekick Greg Barker as Captain Oates, coursing through the snow.

According to his biography, Greg Barker, now the Tory MP for Bexhill & Battle, was chief spin-doctor for the Anglo Siberian Oil Company from 1998-2000 and also worked in Russia for the Sibneft Oil Group, owned by Roman Abramovich. Russian oil companies, owned by oligarchs, are not noted for their green credentials, and their paid propagandists are not usually considered great friends of the environment. But Cameron must have seen something different in the oil-drenched Mr Barker, because he appointed him climate change minister at the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Before the election, Tim Montgomerie, the voice of the Tory grass-roots, warned about climate change deniers in his party:

“You scratch almost any backbencher and you find they are sceptical and I know of six shadow cabinet ministers who are sceptical about the economic consequences of a low-carbon policy.”

Perhaps he could now tell us whether those six shadow cabinet ministers are currently in the government, and who they are. A cabal of six cabinet ministers, sceptical about a shift to a low-carbon economy, represents a major roadblock to Britain meetings its international carbon reduction obligations. Like John Major’s Euro-sceptic ‘bastards’ in his cabinet (of whom he only identified three), the half-dozen climate change deniers in Cameron’s cabinet could split the government.

It’s not just the cabinet. In February 2010, Tim Montgomerie told the Observer:

“You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening.”

By ‘this’ he means policies to achieve low carbon targets.

There’s two ways to look at it. Either Cameron is a prophet in his own land, a true believer in his historic duty to tackle climate change, and he will face down the ’80 or 90%’ of his own party who don’t agree with him. Or he’s just a cunning politician, who saw the need to drag his mastodon of a party into the centre ground, and knew the environment was one button to push. I think it’s the latter, which is the only way to explain the Energy Bill which has its second reading on May 11th.

Chris Huhne, the Macavity of the cabinet, has come up with a bill which is so pathetically limp and ineffectual it would be funny, if we were not faced with the prospect of whole land masses disappearing under the sea. Huhne doesn’t seem to care – he’d rather be picking fights with Sayeeda Warsi to prove his credentials to the Lib Dem grassroots. Cameron doesn’t care either, because the bill creates the illusion of activity without doing anything to rile his own climate change denying back-benchers.

Yesterday in the commons, Cameron proved his makeover is merely a clever trompe l’oeil. On climate change, and on so many other issues, this is the same old Tories. Like the member of a focus group said, they’re like a phone box. It looks nice on the outside, but once you open the door, it just smells of piss.