There really is only one serious party
MRS MAY’S Election manifesto is one of the most powerful and significant political documents of recent years. Written with style and force, it communicates a major change in British politics.
Quite right too. This is a unique Election. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party have openly given up trying to win, instead hoping to retain their core vote with a manifesto from the 1940s.
The Liberal Democrats have given up trying to pretend to be serious, scurrying after cheap votes with an irresponsible pledge to legalise cannabis.
The field is clear for the only serious party of Government, and its extremely serious leader. The Mail on Sunday has already made clear its support for Mrs May, and likewise offers broad approval for this manifesto.
It is sound on public finances, education, law and order and defence.
Where it risks unpopularity, it does so for a good purpose.
David Cameron’s pledges on taxes and the pensions lock were unsustainable – as Chancellor Philip Hammond has already found out in grim detail. They had to go.
And it is obviously foolish to hand out winter fuel payments to well-off older people who do not need them.
Some of its proposals may be unpopular with traditional Tories. The new plan for care home fees risks angering many who have saved prudently for decades to own their own homes, and may well need some thoughtful fine tuning. Burdening private schools with obligations to set up academies seems unfair. Fee-paying parents are already stretched to the limit.
And plans to control energy prices and restrain corporate pay may sound more than a little like Labour pledges. Yet there is nothing Conservative about grotesque inequality, or about greedy pricegouging. Mrs May has a once-in-an-era chance to win voters away from a dying Labour Party, but only if she can distance herself from what these voters (usually wrongly) think Thatcherism was.
As the manifesto says: ‘Conservatism is not and never has been the philosophy described by caricaturists… We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.’
Theresa May means all this. No Tory leader has ever stamped her imprint so swiftly on her party.
And she needs to. For the next five years look likely to be extremely tough, economically, in foreign affairs and above all as we strive to get the best possible deal with the European Union.
She will need all the authority she can get to keep control of her own party and to shame the House of Lords (where she has no majority) into accepting her right to rule.
With less than three weeks to go to polling day, Mrs May is poised to do for the Tory Party something very similar to what Tony Blair did for Labour 20 years ago – to win over large parts of what used to be her opponents’ territory.
What she must not do is alienate the loyal heart of Middle England at the same time. This will be a difficult course to steer but she shows every sign of having a firm hand on the wheel and a very good idea of where she is going.