Cameron's Conservatives are enjoying a lead in the polls, but they know there is no place for complacency, writes Ross Lydall
THIS is the week that Labour has anticipated as much as the Conservatives. For months, the party of government has been desperate for the media spotlight to be shone into the darkest corners of Her Majesty's official Opposition. Why? Because, as minister after minister complains, David Cameron has for too long been able to escape the scrutiny that dogs every utterance of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
This has allowed the reborn Tories to present themselves as a fresh alternative to what is, for many, a tired and tainted government. But the party's annual conference now has to prove that there is substance behind the style. The Thatcher-less Torie
s may now be socially acceptable, but are they electable?
Opinion polls have been telling us so for the last 12 months. It was this time last year when the Tories outmanoeuvred Labour on inheritance tax, Mr Cameron dazzled with his leader's speech and Mr Brown's honeymoon ended. Then came the election that never was and a reversal in both parties' fortunes.
Yesterday one opinion poll put the Tories on 43 per cent to Labour's 31 per cent. The lead may have halved – a result of the post-Labour conference "Brown bounce" – but it is still enough to give Mr Cameron a Commons majority of 58. A week earlier, the most detailed survey ever done of marginal constituencies estimated a Labour meltdown and a Tory landslide with a majority of 146. Yesterday the Electoral Calculus website, which tracks all opinion polls, put the Tory majority at 86.
As such, there is no doubt that voters favour the Tories, at least when talking to pollsters. The difficulty is in turning that theoretical lead into reality. One problem is in overcoming the effects of the electoral system, with its in-built Labour advantage. There is the danger of complacency. Thirdly, there is the need for the Tories to present a compelling case of their own rather than merely relying on current Labour unpopularity. These are dangers that are familiar to Mr Cameron. The phrase in vogue at Conservative headquarters is that the party has yet to "seal the deal" with voters. As Mr Cameron told the BBC yesterday: "People say: 'They haven't sealed the deal.' They are right, we haven't, but we can and we will."
According to yesterday's BPIX poll, the Tory lead over Labour had slipped from 23 points in August to 12 points a month later. Worryingly for the Conservatives, it was the second poll in three days to find that voters – by a narrow margin – preferred Gordon Brown and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, over the Tory alternatives of Mr Cameron and George Osborne.
Hence the need to avoid complacency was a familiar refrain at the opening day of conference. The c-word (complacency) was mentioned by party chairman Caroline Spelman, shadow foreign secretary William Hague and by Mr Cameron himself in an impromptu address prior to an emergency discussion on the economy.
"Our response to our accumulating success in local elections and by-elections will not be to relax our efforts but to redouble them," said Mr Hague. "There must be no complacency. But there can be quiet confidence that this will show we are strong, united positive alternative to that weak and washed-out government."
For her part, Ms Spelman mapped out a five-point plan to win the next general election. The core principle was to stick to the centre ground and stay united, in contrast to Labour infighting. There was also the need to set out a clear plan for change and win the battle of ideas. The icing on the cake would be to "fix our broken society as well as our broken economy".
But despite the rhetoric, there exists a perception that the Tories are lacking in policies; that they have few thought-through ideas. This is not quite the case. At the request of Mr Cameron, senior figures such as Iain Duncan Smith, Ken Clarke and John Redwood have chaired policy groups to devise ideas on poverty, the constitution and transport behind the scenes.
This has led to the emergence of solid commitments, though there has been more of a trickle than a flood. The party is committed to a "fair fuel stabiliser" – remarkably similar to the SNP's fuel duty regulator – that would slice 5p off a litre of petrol. It wants to lift the stamp duty threshold to £250,000, which would remove nine out of ten first-time buyers from the house-purchase tax. It would cut corporation tax to 23 per cent and give the Bank of England greater powers to take over failing institutions.
As a result of Mr Clarke's work, there is also the clear pledge to address the West Lothian Question and give English MPs a "decisive say" over laws that relate only to England. But the biggest unanswered question remains the party's tax policy. The general Tory principle is to prevent government growing as quickly as the economy, thereby generating savings as tax receipts return to the Treasury while a tight hold is kept on money going out. Unfunded tax cuts would be avoided – and tax cuts of any kind may not materialise until a second term of Tory government. The promise is to "share the proceeds of growth" – but that is difficult in a recession, when there is no growth to share.
According to John Curtice, a politics professor at Strathclyde University, the Tories need to deliver a clearer message on tax. He said the party needed to recognise that, following a decade of massive state spending under Labour, there was now a mood for lessening the tax burden on individuals. Prof Curtice said: "The party cannot hope to ride to victory by simply standing on the sidelines as the government tries to handle an apparently endless stream of economic woes. It has to use its spot in the limelight this week to convince voters it has a clear strategy for steering the country out of the economic mess.
"And given the public's obvious worries, that strategy should be delivered with an air of gravitas and statesmanship rather than the political knockabout that often prevails at party conferences."
Asked how Mr Cameron would be able to "seal the deal" with voters, Scottish Tory leader Annabel Goldie told The Scotsman: "At the moment, all we can do is look at the trend in the polls.
"Across the UK, David Cameron is certainly interesting voters. I think it's clear that he has broken through to an audience that the Conservatives were not previously reaching. The average we are polling is now in the lower twenties. That is a vast improvement on where we were in 2005."
Letwin aims to replicate the pre-planning of New LabourA SERIES of "bold" policies will be unveiled at the Conservative Party conference this week, the party's policy chief promised last night
Oliver Letwin, the former shadow chancellor who has been working behind the scenes for two-and-a-half years, said the aim was to replicate the pre-planning of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before New Labour came to power – but implement the ideas more successfully.
He said: "It's not just the specific policies that we have been introducing to this conference that matter. It's part of an architecture that has been very carefully developed. We have spent two years hard at work opening up the issues.
"Since the completion of that last summer, we have been steadily producing green papers going through how we are going to change the schools system, the welfare system, how we are going to take people out of the crime system. There is now a very substantial body of very carefully crafted Conservative policy."
However, Mr Letwin, speaking at a fringe event at the conference, rejected calls from figures such as former Scottish secretary Lord (Michael) Forsyth for a commitment to tax cuts. He said the Tories had vowed to follow Labour's spending plans, due to be reviewed in 2010, because they were suitably "tough" for the current economic downturn.
He said tax cuts could only be guaranteed "over an economic cycle" – which tend to last around a decade – because government spending could be reduced by comparison to the growth of the economy, thereby leaving spare cash to give back to taxpayers.
Matthew Taylor, a former 10 Downing Street adviser, warned that politicians of all parties would be trying desperately to win over voters in the next 18 months.
He said that "in electioneering mode, all politicians will be prone to pandering to the electorate" and were unlikely to be honest about imposing tough policies.
"They're going to say Britain is falling apart, they're going to say it's the job of government to give the public what the public wants, and they're going to say that what it needs to make society better is new government," he said.
The full article contains 1498 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
