Cameron’s Cowardice shows the collapse of modern Conservatism

The Conservative electorate strategy is to contrast their ‘strong leadership’ (as it says on their website) with Labour’s supposed weakness and vacillation. David Cameron is the man with a strategy, Ed Balls stutters and Ed Miliband dangerously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It boils down to endlessly repeating the same line about a ‘long term economic plan’, although the plan itself gets cut and reshaped as every new stache of statistics comes out. Remember, remember, the Tories ditched their original plan to abolish the deficit by 2015, and adopted Alastair Darling’s goal of halving the deficit – which they then missed. But never mind, if you repeat it enough times people will believe you.

Until this last few days I thought they actually believed their argument. But Cameron’s refusal to appear in a televised debate without five (or is it six) smaller party leaders to hold his hand shows that it’s all just tactics and not based on real conviction. If he really thought he had a plan, he’d be willing to defend it on whatever TV format he could.

His cowardice shows the modern-day Tory party has no heart or soul. It, fundamentally, doesn’t know what it stands for.

Modern-day Conservatism was born in the 1970s, in an attempt to manage what many saw as a crisis. It was forged in response to a sense amongst the country’s elite and middle classes that Britain was sliding towards catastrophe if the Tory party didn’t step forward and lead us back to order. As my colleague Richard Vinen argues, Thatcherism was about re-establishing authority in a time of industrial chaos and fragmented power, not only expanding the scope of the free market. 1980s Conservatism didn’t belong to the radical right, but was a pragmatic centrist effort to impose order on a country it thought was breaking down. I’d argue that its love of big business came from a fascination with people who looked tough and knew what they were doing, not a sense profit was good (although they thought that too). The Tories loved people who (to quote the original Francis Urquart) could ‘put a bit of stick about’ even if they themselves were often far more pliable in reality.

It was their myth of tough-minded decisiveness, with its ever-present edge of authoritarianism, which gave the Tories the image of the nasty party. It also meant the right in Britain were far easily undermined by sleaze than the left; sex scandals and cash in brown envelopes are more damaging if your project is re-asserting moral order to a country in decline. The 1990s and early 2000s, with the end of the cold war and beginning of social media made the threat of disorder and the stark moral polarities of 1980s Thatcherism look out of touch.

The Tories eventually responded with compassionate conservatism and the big society, intelligent efforts to reach back before the crises of the 1970s to older, more consensual and centrist right-wing values. But that didn’t stick. As Labourlist’s Conor Pope noted a couple of weeks ago, Tory efforts to mitigate the idea they were authoritarian and nasty were quickly abandoned. In their place we had Andrew Lansley’s divisive health reforms, a pugilistic education secretary, and Lynton Crosby’s benefit caps.

Now, Lynton Crosby is the Labour Party’s strongest asset (remember he ran the Conservatives 2005 election campaign). His only insight is to reconcile the importance of patriotic, social-conservative blue collar voters. But for the most part, his politics is rooted in a world we don’t live in any more.

This isn’t the 1970s. Our ‘crisis’ now is not about chaos or social breakdown. The answer to low wages, to social dislocation, to the feeling that politicians are out of touch and don’t have any answers is not to incite conflict and impose central power. It’s to listen, to get people together, to build a consensus that involves otherwise divided sections of society and only then then take a tough stand.

The Tories leadership’s advantage now is a clear if fatuous story (stick with the economic plan), and a sense that however bad things are now Labour might make them even worse. Their great disadvantage is the fact they are ruled by short-term tactics; beneath their single strapline are countless twists and turns of actual economic and political strategy, a vacillating incoherent jumble of initiatives and short-term actions.. As Cameron’s obsession with his ‘plan’ makes clear, they are still obsessed with the old idea of central authority and order’; but the TV debate bottle out shows they don’t believe it.

The lesson for Labour should be this – there isn’t much mileage in attacking the Tories for being the nasty party because the are too inconsistent and uncertain about that themselves. The danger is we have too strong an image of them in our own minds, as service-cutting free marketeers, when they are actually far more vacillating. ‘Same old Tories’ might strengthen the idea that Britain is in the state so many people voted for Thatcher to fix (it isn’t). Their weakness is actually what they accuse Labour of. They are stuck with an out-dated Thatcherite model of un-consensual ‘strong leadership’. But practically, they are plagued by uncertainty, vacillation, are never capable of sticking to a plan, easily manipulated by one vested interested or another and so pushed this way or that. Ed needs to ridicule Cameron for trying to be something he isn’t, for not knowing what he’s talking about and for bottling out of a conversation which might have involved a challenge.