Radicals or conservatives? How can we tell?

| David Aaronovitch - Times Online

Hardly had the Queenbound PM de-limoed at Buck House than the Tarquins and Henriettas appeared en masse outside our local station. My constituency is a three-way marginal, and the local Conservative candidate arrived earliest, mob-handed, among the Hermès scarves, to leaflet commuters.

Nice man. Early thirties. Gleaming. Oxford graduate and self-made millionaire. State educated — although only in the Conservative Party can attendance at a famed grammar school be made to sound as if one was born into a life of privation.

So what wasn’t to like? Every colourful leaflet, listing all the campaigns he’d been involved in locally to stop things (council tax rises, police station and hospital closures — the usual impossible mix of spending more while taxing less) was “printed on paper containing fibre sourced from fully sustainable managed forests”.

Last week the candidate explained to the local newspaper the apparent contradiction between such greenery and ownership of both a Porsche and a Range Rover thus: “Buying a new car consumes a lot more materials and causes more pollution. My mileage is negligible and I carbon offset.”

My colleague Matthew Parris is always very open that his tribe is the Tory party. I should be equally honest that mine is the Not-Tory party. My tribe does not drive Range Rovers on city streets or keep them undriven. It struggles with the meaning of golf.

But extract My Tory Candidate from his backdrop of Tarquins and I would find it difficult to be scared of a government composed of such people. MTC is liberal on social issues, not wanting to change the abortion laws; he is pro-EU (a fact to be gauged from his refusal even to discuss the issue with the local paper) and does not appear to be a gouger from the bodies of the poor. Even if he made his money in real estate in the Balkans, he has spent some of it on good works.

Also — a matter for another column — his sitting Labour opponent is a grumpy septuagenarian who has, for years now, inhabited an ideas-free zone. When David Cameron quipped the other day that a government led by him “couldn’t do any worse” than the current lot, the image of this MP came to mind.

So why not slip into the polling station and quietly cast a ballot for MTC? I am ashamed of part of the explanation because it is one of those dreadful, reiterated clichés of election campaigns. I happily support this newspaper’s vision for the Britain of 2015. It would be a highly educated, flexible, outward-looking country, presided over by a reforming government. But — cliché about to land — I have absolutely no idea whether Mr Cameron’s Conservatives have the practical capacity to be such an administration or the philosophical desire to build such a country. In summary, I don’t know whether he and his party are radical or conservative. Every time I think this has been resolved one way, something happens to suggest the opposite.

Take the mood oddly revealed by Labour’s utterly misconceived poster last week. The point of making Mr Cameron a throwback to the 1980s, in the shape of the Ashes to Ashes character Gene Hunt, was to warn the electorate of a return to the bad old days. The problem is that a section of voters have got it into their heads that almost any time was better than this, including punch-the-bad-guy policing. Mr Cameron’s response? “I think there will be thousands of people, millions of people, in the country who wish it was the 1980s and that police were out there feeling collars and nicking people instead of filling in forms.”

In humour, truth. And in rhetoric, revelation. Mr Cameron’s setpiece speech on Tuesday contained the obligatory reference to “decent, hard-working” people (a category very few of us deny to ourselves), but he developed the theme of the Great Ignored. His contention was that the ordinary, hard-working, taxpaying majority of the land had been forgotten, presumably in the rush to palliate the extraordinary, lazy, scrounging minority.

That his speech sounded very much like Richard Nixon’s invocation of the “silent majority” suggests the eternal power of nurturing grievances among those who are generally doing OK. In reality, the truly Great Ignored are still the disabled and their families, the young unemployed and those on low incomes, who — in general — cannot raise a fuss. But this was not Mr Cameron’s point.

The Great Ignored is part of a rhetoric of reaction — the inferred promise of a return to a more secure age, full of post offices, cheap petrol, fewer immigrants and, above all, less change. When the Shadow Home Secretary (not, please note, the Shadow Transport Secretary or the Shadow Defence Secretary) Chris Grayling was discovered suggesting that B&B owners should have the right, in effect, to hang No Gays notices in their windows, it indicated that he simply didn’t understand what anti-discrimination legislation is for.

Though Mr Grayling was quickly repudiated, it made me wonder how deep the Cameroonian modernisation had gone. Mr Cameron himself, after all, has voted for tightening limits on abortion, as did most of his MPs. Then there’s the stuff about marriage.

But far more serious, in a way, is the party’s policy on immigration which — out in the sticks — many of its candidates are pushing quite hard. To boil it down, the Tories are more or less arguing that new immigration should stop. Not because they think immigration is bad economically. On the contrary. Not that voters’ actual experience of immigration is bad — with only 18 per cent seeing immigration as a problem in their own areas). But because it means that things change faster than people like.

This lack of radicalism on migration is really matched only by the conservatism on the NHS, where the Conservative policy for reform appears to be to do nothing, in complete contrast to their policy on education, a service that consumes considerably less money. So MTC, who says that he came into politics because his dad got MRSA in hospital and “I thought, ‘we pay a lot of taxes — there has got to be a better way of running the health service’,” ends up simply offering more of the same.

The whole thing is so confusing. The Conservatives are excellent on defence and internationalism, but useless and deceptive on Europe. They say good words about the poor, but suggest that their policy emphasis will be on reducing taxes for the middle classes and — amazingly — the very wealthy. Their key word is change, but much of time they seem to promise the past as much as the future. It’s a promise that cannot be kept.