Don’t court the liberals too much, David

THESE are heady times for the Tories. For years they have ‘flat-lined’ in elections and opinion polls, seldom attracting support from more than 32 or 33 per cent of the electorate. It has been like that since the day in September 1992 when Britain tumbled out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the Tories lost their reputation for financial competence.

But since David Cameron was elected leader of the party two weeks ago, extraordinary things have happened. Several opinion polls have shown the Conservatives breaking out of the doldrums where they have lingered for so long. One put them a startling nine points ahead of New Labour. These are early days, but an amazing sea- change appears to be taking place in British politics.

This is undeniably the Cameron effect. No one can seriously think that had David Davis won the leadership contest, the Conservative Party would have enjoyed such a sudden revival. Mr Cameron believes that the Tories can only win power again if they position themselves firmly in the centre ground of British politics. So far, his analysis is proving triumphantly correct.

I claim no particular insight into his thinking, but it is not unfathomable. Mr Cameron holds that the Tories can never regain office as long as they are caricatured in the liberal media — by which I principally mean the all-pervasive BBC — as unpleasant and dodgy headbangers. To some degree that was the fate of Michael Howard in the election six months ago, as it was of William Hague four years earlier.

Of course, no one can prove the extent to which the undecided middle-ground of the British electorate is influenced by the BBC and other liberal media. But it is certain that over recent weeks Mr Cameron has received star treatment in quarters where Tories are not normally feted. Partly he has been the beneficiary of Tony Blair’s unpopularity. His youthful good looks have also commended him. But most of all it is his essentially liberal message that has won him so many plaudits.

FRIENDS of mine who would not normally vote Tory — who indeed regard Conservatives as not much better than the Ku Klux Klan — remark how refreshing a figure David Cameron is in comparison with Tony Blair who, of course, they lauded in similar terms only ten years ago. They can imagine themselves voting for Mr Cameron, and many of them probably will. Much can still go wrong, but some people believe that David Cameron has as good a chance of being Prime Minister after the next general election as does Gordon Brown.

The man who wrote the last Tory Party manifesto, and was a loyal lieutenant to the supposedly nasty Michael Howard, is straining to convince the liberal media that he really is a different sort of Tory. On Sunday, the Left-leaning Observer carried an appreciative interview with Mr Cameron, along with an enthusiastic front page story with the sub- head: ‘ Tory leader dumps party rhetoric on immigration.’ He was represented as ‘ the voice of moderate, progressive Britain’. No wonder the Lib Dems are panic- stricken.

And indeed, Mr Cameron’s approach to curing the Tory malaise is essentially correct. Conservatives who still maintain that their party would have done better in the last two elections if it had been more Right- wing are surely misguided. In 2001 and 2005, the Tories presented a pretty Right-wing platform — or at any rate a set of policies which could plausibly be represented by the BBC and other liberal media as Right- wing — and they lost. David Cameron is right: if they are ever to win power again, they need to cultivate the centre ground, and if they are to do this, they must at least neutralise the liberal media.

And yet his comments about immigration will have bewildered natural Tory voters and probably many others. My own view during the last election was that Michael Howard dwelt on immigration too much, though to a large extent this was not of his own doing, and he was continually driven back into a corner where he was depicted as obsessive, and possibly extreme, by bien pensant opinion which sees any intelligent discussion of immigration as taboo. But Mr Howard’s achievement, probably because he is himself the son of immigrants, was to dismiss such stereotyping, and to establish that there should be no association between disquiet about unfettered immigration and racist views. After all, many members of ethnic minorities have misgivings about illegal asylum seekers.

OPINION polls suggested that immigration was an issue on which voters preferred the Tories’ policy to that of Labour by a margin of more than 20 points. However, Labour strategists claimed that Lib Dem voters disillusioned with Tony Blair were persuaded to vote Labour because they objected so strongly to the Tories’ stance. Pollsters also said that the Conservative policy on immigration helped to repel some women voters. My suspicion is that although many electors in the centre ground may have privately agreed with the Tories’ line, they were persuaded by the liberal media that it was extreme.

Of course, it wasn’t. In a world of cheap and easy air travel, every state must watch its borders and control the rate of immigration, not least to ensure happy race relations. Mr Cameron was correct to imply to the Observer that the Tory manifesto (which he wrote!) was probably wrong in wishing to impose a quota on asylum seekers, since such a rigid system could exclude bona fide applicants who might be sent back to nasty regimes. But there should be no argument about the need to restrict the influx of would-be immigrants to manageable proportions.

Does Mr Cameron realise this? It is not clear from his Observer interview. Very possibly he is merely creating the right mood music. He wants to reassure people that Tories are humane and reasonable, and a good place to start is in a newspaper at the heart of the liberal establishment. If the liberal media are apt to depict any Tory leader as a headbanger, he can hardly be blamed for setting out his stall as a caring and decent human being. Modern politics is largely about language, as Tony Blair will attest, and Mr Cameron is at a stage at which he is thinking about creating an impression rather than enunciating policies.

Such is the path that the Tories will have to walk if they are to return to office. It may well be, if or when Mr Cameron gains power, that he will turn out both humane and realistic about the limits of immigration. But a suspicion lingers that a man who has enjoyed a privileged upbringing and education, as well as employment in the narrow, gilded metropolitan worlds of PR and politicking, may be so disconnected from ordinary people that he does not understand their fears and concerns. One day, hard decisions will have to be made. There will come a time when he will have to set less store on the applause of the liberal media and more on the interests of the country.