Moral missions make no sense to those who treat politics as a branch of PR

Osborne’s clash with IDS highlights a division in the Tory party between those playing a tactical game and others driven by principle

Well, who couldn’t see that coming? It was widely known in Westminster that Iain Duncan Smith saw his commitment to welfare reform as something utterly different from – and sometimes explicitly incompatible with – George Osborne’s political plans. And by “plans”, I don’t mean simply the Chancellor’s personal leadership ambitions.

The Osborne view of party management was all about tactical objectives and message control. It had little time for the sort of passionate conviction that was at the heart of the Duncan Smith project to make the national epidemic of benefit dependency a thing of the past. What IDS wanted was to rescue everyone who could be rescued from the futility and despair of a workless, pointless existence. He wanted to save lives. What Mr Osborne wanted was to save money.

Whatever the chronological details of this little drama, of who said what to whom and when, the ultimate crash was inevitable. This was not just about those particular disputed disability benefits, or even the balance between tax cuts for the well-off and further reductions in payments to the vulnerable. It was a head-on collision between those who believe that politics should be a moral mission – that you should not be engaged in this business at all unless you hope to do some social good – and those who see it as a game to be won making use of whatever clever manipulative tools happen to be at hand.

So this has been coming for a long time: this thunderous collapse of the loose confederation between Conservative politicians who believed in something they thought was worth fighting for to the death, and those who had adopted the model of politics as a branch of public relations.

In fact, the Duncan Smith welfare reforms had been useful to the Osborne opinion-management plans at the outset. They provided what seemed to be an attractive message of modern Conservatism: to incentivise work and enable every member of society who possibly could to be productive. It was a compelling picture that was completely consistent with the idea of a Tory party that stood by people who worked hard and wanted to get on. If, in order to do that, you had to make it harder for people to live a life of permanent dependency, that would be pretty widely acceptable too. Indeed, the whole concept was wildly popular with voters – especially those who actually did work for a living and resented those who didn’t.

For a long time (perhaps still) it was the most successful vote-winning policy that the Conservatives had. But it turned out that some of the transitional stages in this social transformation might actually cost more in the short and medium term than the present arrangements. In order to get people off welfare and into work, you had to make sure that they would always be financially better off in employment.

That’s when it got a bit messy. There had to be a form of reverse income tax (tax credits) for the lowpaid, which cost the government money, and a higher minimum wage, which added further costs to business.

The rest of that story is history and needn’t be pursued here. What remains is the central question of what a life in politics is about. And that brings us to the party split over membership of the EU. That is the great divide: the mega-question of principle and conviction. The Brexiteers – of whom Mr Duncan Smith is, of course, a principal member – are utterly, unreservedly, unquestionably adamant that we must withdraw from the European Union.

But it is not just the substance of their disagreement with the Remain camp – as exemplified by David Cameron and Mr Osborne – that makes their opposition so significant. It is its character. Where the Cameron-Osborne camp claimed that their view on membership could in theory (however far-fetched the possibility really was) be altered by the details of “the deal” that was achieved in negotiations, the hardline, old-school Leave people were clear that their principled objections were non-negotiable.

The right of the British people to govern themselves was not a matter for bargaining or concessions: it was a historic legacy that no sitting government could offer to trade for whatever favours might be granted. If the Brexit camp seemed intransigent or unreasonable it was only because they believed that no politician should have the power to give away the selfdetermination of the country. It was not theirs to give – full stop. This argument was always misconceived: the two camps are, as the philosopher Wittgenstein might have said, playing different language games. It is not a difference of opinion over the “advantages” or “disadvantages” of being in or out of the EU. That computation does not even come into it for the dedicated Brexit camp. What is at issue is whether any generation of political leaders who happen to be in office can choose to relinquish the historical identity of the United Kingdom as a nation state.

The referendum is supposed to be an opportunity for the people themselves to make that decision but the choice can only be properly understood if the politicians leading the public argument are addressing the question in the same terms. Is this about the benefits of staying in, as opposed to the risks of coming out? Or does it give one particular electoral generation the chance to close down (presumably forever) what has been taken for granted as part of the country’s constitutional heritage in the past, and to severely limit what may be possible in the future?

The Eurosceptics, of which Mr Duncan Smith has been a consistent member since his arrival on the Westminster scene, are sometimes referred to disparagingly as the “irreconcilables”, which implies that they will never give way. By implication, there should be no principle so sacred that it cannot be up for grabs in the great bartering process, which is all that is left to national governments within the EU.

What happens now? Mr Osborne was already damaged by his incoherent, deliberately obfuscating Budget, which was exposed almost immediately as failing to add up. So his image of economic competence was pretty well shot. Then he apparently alienated the Cabinet minister who was responsible for a policy package that had been the most popular initiative his government had undertaken, not just with Conservative voters but independents and Labour supporters too. Indeed, the Labour front bench became deeply uncomfortable whenever it was faced with questions about its support for Tory welfare reforms – so admired were they by those hardworking families that Labour claims to represent.

So Mr Osborne’s reputation as a tactical political genius has gone south too. Maybe that’s been the problem all along: his understanding of politics was all about tactics – about messaging and grids, presentational gloss and re-branding – and had nothing to do with fundamental, irreconcilable principle. I am prepared to guess that he quite literally does not understand politicians who are prepared to risk everything for an idea, a conviction: a personal moral mission.

He thinks that they are bloodyminded and naive, with no comprehension of the modern science of winning elections. But that, it seems, is not what the people believe: they are beginning to think that their leaders should stand for something, should have a fundamental sense of what they are in politics for. It’s what they call “authenticity”, and it could turn out to be more of a winner than all the clever marketing techniques in the world. Imagine that.