The Right-wing agitators out to get Cameron

David Cameron bisieged by Right-wing agitators oblivious to the man on the street

t took me a very long time working for newspapers to grasp that traditional reporting skills were in some respects an impediment when it came to political journalism. I had a habit of taking things literally. But in Westminster circles they talk about the “construction of a narrative”. To a layman, narrative means story, or fiction, and this is a clue. Politicians all want to sell a plausible tale to the public, and many political journalists want to help them do it.

But before I deal with the fictions, let’s first of all spell out the facts. The Cameron/clegg Government is strong. The coalition between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives is working far better than many people expected. There have, of course, been severe problems, but both sides have kept to the promises made in the Coalition Agreement.

Last month’s Budget was a shambles. Nevertheless, George Osborne’s economic strategy has not collapsed, and he deserves admiration for his attempt to confront taxdodgers head on, even though he has not got it quite right yet. And bear in mind that if Britain had pursued the spending plans set out by Alistair Darling before the election, or by Ed Balls after it, we would be having trouble financing our deficit in the markets, and long-term interest rates would be climbing towards double figures.

Meanwhile, the Coalition has pushed through very bold reforms. Andrew Lansley has been the first health secretary since Kenneth Clarke 25 years ago to take on the vested interests behind the NHS. Iain Duncan Smith and his hugely talented team are confronting the moral problem created by the post-war welfare state, and in doing so are liberating hundreds and thousands of men and women to lead responsible, fulfilled lives free of state dependency. Likewise, it is hard to praise too highly the work being carried out by Michael Gove. For half a century, the teaching unions have enforced a regime of mediocrity and low standards in British schools, condemning millions of children to a second-rate life. Gove is the first education secretary to have the courage to try to do something about this criminal abuse of power.

But forcing change on the heroic scale envisaged by these men is very difficult. The easy bit is pushing the legislation through Parliament. The more intractable and often heartbreaking task is changing very deep-seated cultures inside departments, local bureaucracies, schools, hospitals and housing estates. Fundamentally, the success or failure of the Coalition no longer has much to do with what is going on in Westminster or being written in newspapers. Its fate is being decided where it really matters, in Jobcentres in Sunderland and classrooms in Swindon: out there on the ground.

Nevertheless, Parliament must continue to meet, and newspapers must be written. And here there is a dangerous vacuum. This has not been filled by the Labour Party, which has a constitutional duty to oppose but is hampered by the fact that it largely agrees with the Coalition’s most profound reforms.

The vacuum has been occupied by a handful of loud voices on the Right wing of the Tory party, who have created a narrative that David Cameron is incompetent and out of touch. Each setback gives the opportunity for a fresh wave of criticism, which is only likely to get more painful and frenetic. We have reached a situation where practically every event can be twisted to fit the thesis of governmental disintegration.

Behind these critical voices there is an insistent message: Cameron has betrayed the Conservative Party and its grassroots. Some of the attacks are becoming personal and vicious. “The problem,” said the Tory MP Nadine Dorries last month, “is that policy is being run by two public schoolboys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunch boxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.” This kind of language is unforgivable.

There are approximately a dozen strident critics of the leadership, and the more outlandish their views, the less they represent the Tory party as a whole. Indeed, these voices would count for very little indeed but for the Conservative Home website, run by Tim Montgomerie, who was Iain Duncan Smith’s chief of staff a decade ago.

For most Daily Telegraph readers, who read the newspaper over the breakfast table or on a commuter train, Conservative Home requires an explanation, which is best conveyed by the famous phrase of the great West Indian cricket writer CLR James: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”

The same remark applies to politics, only more so. The growth of the internet has encouraged the development of a monocultural community of young men (very few women) who are devoted users of Twitter, serial attenders of think-tank breakfasts and keen analysers of each and every political event.

Conservative Home insists that it speaks for mainstream Conservatives, a claim that I used to be sympathetic to, but which is surely now only believed by BBC television and radio producers, and which needs to be exploded. The lives of most Tory supporters are too interesting, enjoyable and civically engaged for them to read it. The website, as its recent interventions demonstrate, represents a narrow, Rightwing faction. It is given to issuing “alternative manifestos”. It has just concluded a disloyal survey of 1,500 Tory party members in an attempt to find out which Conservative politician is favoured to succeed Mr Cameron. It wages a poorly judged campaign against the Tory chairman, Sayeeda Warsi. It was a supporter of the Downing Street director of communications, Andy Coulson, who has since been arrested.

Recently, in an act of spectacular immaturity, the website called for the Health and Social Care Bill to be ditched at the last minute. It is certainly significant that this influential website is controlled by Lord Ashcroft, who has been left out in the cold since the election and is perhaps resentful that no ministerial role has been found for him.

Tim Montgomerie last week suggested that it had been a strategic mistake for the Conservative Party to become so close to the Liberal Democrats after May 2010, instead of following Margaret Thatcher’s “ruthlessly effective strategy of divide and rule”. This argument is characteristic of his website’s inward-looking, parochial and querulous outlook. The truth is that Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg did not choose to cohabit out of self-interest, but were driven by patriotic motives to join forces to confront Britain’s greatest economic crisis for a century.

This attack on the Coalition illustrates one of the problems with being a political obsessive. It is very hard to see anything in its wider perspective. Of course, it is true that the Prime Minister and his colleagues have made some quite serious mistakes. But these errors should be understood in the context of a serious government making its way through a mid-term squall, not as a mortal crisis. One of Mr Cameron’s very best qualities is that, though a career politician, he understands that politics matters very little to most people. In the fetid world of Westminster, that looks like weakness. In the real world, it is part of his charm and his appeal.