Politics at the top demands trade-offs. Every prime minister does the things that they have to do, in order to buy the right to do the things they want to do.
That is more difficult for some than for others. David Cameron had a tough time: he never wanted to be Mr Austerity, but circumstances forced him to be much more flinty and less cuddly than he planned. He pledged to match Labour’s spending plans, as part of his modernisation agenda, and fought to maintain that position for almost a year after the financial crisis began. Eventually, he had to concede that the fiscal circumstances had left him out of step with voters, and economic good sense. So began the process of abandoning the programme which he had once dreamed of.
More brutally still, Gordon Brown spent so long intensely focusing on ensuring his accession to the top job would be inevitable, that by the time he got there, he appeared to have lost any sense of why he wanted it in the first place. It left him rudderless at best, and raging at worst.
This battle between what a politician must be and what they desire to be is often painful. Even more cruel is that the deciding element is chance. You can go to all sorts of extremes – spend years undermining your closest ally, or travel to a glacier to drive a dogsled, for goodness’ sake – to nurture your vision, only for events to smash it into matchsticks.
Some prime ministers are unlucky, finding their plans for office ruined by the times in which they occupy it. But a rare few have the good fortune to find that what they had always hoped to do coincides neatly with the electoral demands of the time.
It seems that Theresa May is just such a lucky politician. She has long advocated a consistent message: that politics isn’t a game, it is about people’s lives; that those who are “just about managing” need more help; that Conservatives ought to act against economic, social and legal injustices afflicting those beyond their traditional base. Everyone remembers that in 2002 she told the Conservative conference: “You know what some people call us – the nasty party.” Few remember the preceding sentence: “Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies.” The “nasty party” comment grabbed the headlines, but other comment continues to define her politics.
She has developed this philosophy for 15 years, aided by Nick Timothy, who advised her at the Home Office and now serves as joint chief of staff in Downing Street. It’s called Erdington conservatism, after the working-class area of Birmingham where Timothy grew up. Both the prime minister and her aide believed it to be morally right, but they also believed it to hold hidden potential at the ballot box.
May’s good fortune is that she is prime minister at a time when the electoral potency of her philosophy is at its greatest.
Many voters she has in mind – those on low incomes, with limited if any savings, battling rising bills, harbouring ambitions for their children but fearing for their opportunities, suspicious of big business as well as nosey officialdom – have never so much as contemplated voting Conservative. Culturally and tribally Labour, they live disproportionately in the Midlands and northern towns where voting blue had become taboo.
In normal times, Erdington conservatism might have made some inroads. But it would have been a house-to-house fight, taking years to deliver a large and lasting change in the electoral landscape.
Chance, however, has handed May abnormal times. The same voters who fit her vision are also far more likely to have voted leave. Millions had already abandoned Labour in favour of Ukip, finding a route to the Eurosceptic right without having to vote Tory. Many who stuck with Labour ignored the party when it told them to vote remain, and have watched as it failed to engage with the result in the months since the referendum.
Simultaneously, Labour’s chosen leader offends many of the values these voters hold. His associations with the IRA and other terrorists, his dislike of the monarchy, his weakness on defence, and his right-on, flannelling leftism leave them cold at best. Even leaving Brexit aside, Jeremy Corbyn’s world of Marxist splinter groups and tinny megaphone speeches has little resonance in the lives of people whom his party has long taken for granted.
These factors have cut the ties that once bound a significant number of voters to Labour. They don’t guarantee victory for May: David Cameron and Hillary Clinton can attest that no outcome is ever certain, and the social care fiasco is a reminder that any would-be prime minister is walking a tightrope. But they do give her the opportunity to communicate a compelling message to people who would otherwise have been far less likely to listen.
If she makes the most of her good fortune, avoids any more unforced errors, and thereby wins their support, she must then strive to convert it from a loan to a permanent commitment. There could yet be other bumps in that road – her genuine belief in the international aid target, for instance, is not famously popular among these target voters. If she is lucky enough to build a new electoral coalition, maintaining it might yet require a trade-off. (Guardian)
