News Review interview: David Cameron
Unfazed by his falling poll lead, the Tory leader is turning tough, dour and aggressive to challenge an increasingly cavalier Gordon Brown
Dominic Lawson
David Cameron prides himself on treating Kipling’s two impostors, triumph and disaster, just the same. So in the week when the Conservative lead in the opinion polls has crumbled to three points and the entire business establishment has seemed to line up behind Gordon Brown’s plans to borrow still more to reflate the economy, the Tory leader appears as relaxed and self-confident as ever. But with all the political turbulence, is he still relishing the job and managing at the same time to enjoy family life?
“Yes, these are turbulent times and there are huge challenges facing the Conservative party, but I feel more confident than ever that I have found a good team and I’m happy in the job. And I do feel I still spend enough time with the family. Last night I got home at seven and read Noddy for the millionth time to Elwyn and put the children to bed and then Sam and I had supper together and just watched televi-sion. That doesn’t happen every night, admittedly.”
Immediately outside the tight-knit family unit, one of Cameron’s closest friends is George Osborne, the shadow chancellor. Notwithstanding Cameron’s remarks about his “good team”, how worried is he about the loud murmurings within the Tory party that (partly as a result of ill-advised talks about party donations on a Russian oligarch’s yacht) Osborne should make way for a political heavyweight with government experience, such as Ken Clarke?
“It doesn’t worry me too much.
You have these times in politics when you go through the wringer; but the fact is that George is a tough, confident and robust person and he’s got good judgment and he will come through this.”
I point out that Cameron and Osborne are each godparents to one of the other’s children. In such circumstances is it possible for him to be as objective as he needs to be as a boss?
“Funnily enough, I’d almost say the opposite in a way. That makes me sound rather cold and heartless – you know, I had to sack a friend from the shadow cabinet [fellow Old Etonian Hugo Swire] and I did. I mean, I hope I’m a kind and gentle and friendly and compassionate person but I’m also very tough. And George is also able to look at the situation objectively, knowing that he’s been through a tough time and he’s got to come through it.”
The Batman and Robin of the modern Conservative party are now united in a politically high-risk strategy to oppose outright the fiscal stimulus – otherwise known as hand-outs – that Alistair Darling, the chancellor, is set to announce to parliament tomorrow. Hold on a second, though: wasn’t Cameron only the other day saying that the Conservative party would try to forge a “bipartisan consensus” on the economy in such dire national circumstances?
“Look at exactly what I said. When I gave the speech at our party conference about all-party support, it clearly applied to the immediate banking crisis, the need to rescue the banks. It did not mean that we backed the fact that the government are borrowing so much. It did not mean that we backed their broader economic policy. But Gordon Brown, he’s a very cunning politician. What he always does with any offer of support about anything is to say, ‘Ah, well, if you support this thing over here, you support everything I do.’ It’s a tactic he has.”
I suggest to the Tory leader that his strictures about Brown’s fiscally irresponsible behaviour would sound more convincing if he had not earlier committed his party to matching Labour’s spending plans through to 2010 – plans that he now argues are partly responsible for the nation’s overborrowed state.
“I switched policy because they had become unaffordable. We can have an argument about whether they became unaffordable earlier and whether we should have moved earlier. But the Conservative party is doing what an opposition party ought to be doing, which is to warn of the huge cost of what the government seems determined to embark upon.
“We’re talking about a public borrowing requirement of maybe £70 billion this year and over £100 billion next year. And the question is: what are the risks of going ahead? I’ve been very careful not to say – considering such hideous consequences there could be as a result, for sterling, long-term interest rates and the ability to fund the debt – not to say that these things will happen, but that these things might happen.”
However, Brown’s point, backed by serried ranks of economists, is that the greater risk to the economy lies in not borrowing more money to avert a slump, isn’t it? “He says the risk of inaction is worse than the risk of action but he doesn’t even want to admit to the affordability problem because the reason why it is so potentially unaffordable is because he’s put us there.”
There is a sense in which Brown is successfully painting himself as the FDR fighting to get the world out of a slump, with Cameron as a pale imitation of the do-nothing approach of the US Republican party in the 1930s, isn’t there?
“I just think that’s wrong. We are being extraordinarily active in terms of ideas to combat unemployment and rising repossessions, helping small businesses’ cash flow, making sure that money flows from the banks into businesses.
“Of course the prime minister will try to paint one of his famous dividing lines because he sits in Downing Street endlessly scheming up dividing lines. The real dividing line is that I’m telling the truth about the bad state of the public finances and he’s taking everyone for fools. That’s a dividing line I’m happy to debate between now and the next election.”
Ah, the next election. Many prime ministers before Brown have run the economic cycle to fit the political cycle: that is, they have cut taxes in the year or two leading up to a general election without worrying too much about how to pay the bill afterwards, just so long as it wins them another term in office. Does Cameron think that is what is going on now?
“I think he has the sense . . . he knows he has a huge share of the responsibility for the mess we’re already in. He knows it’s going to get worse and I think he knows the longer this goes on, the more he’s going to get found out. I think that’s why the kitchen sink is being dispatched with such haste. He must know this, having given us lectures about prudence for so many years, having said so many times that you can’t spend your way out of a recession, having said so many times that unfunded tax cuts are irresponsible. He must know the frustration of talking to other world leaders, who’ve got surpluses and can afford to do what we can’t, which is to distribute those surpluses.”
Cameron used to work in the Treasury as a special adviser to Norman Lamont, then the chancellor. Does his experience there lead him to believe that Darling and his officials are nervous about the borrowing that Brown seems determined to increase still further?
“Oh yes, it’s Gordon at the controls with his foot hard on the accelerator and I think Alistair Darling and the Treasury are desperately worried that this could impair the finances for years to come and we’ll be paying increased taxes for years and years as a result. You can almost hear the concern in the Treasury. In fact you can read it in the papers.”
Yet, I say, some MPs are now saying this could be Labour’s Falklands war – a crisis that was in large part caused by British government policy errors, but that was the making of a prime minister and led to election victory. Cameron lets out a shudder of distaste at the analogy.
“The key thing for me is: why are we where we are? There are two arguments being made: one by the Conservatives, which is that there were international causes but that we made some profound mistakes in Britain and Gordon Brown is responsible for that. It wasn’t America that made us the most indebted country on earth or said we should remove the Bank of England from its role of regulating debt in the economy.
“Gordon Brown’s argument that this all comes from America, like the movie The Monster that Came from the Deep, it’s nothing to do with me: this is a ludicrous argument and this will be understood by people.”
If it’s so obvious that Brown is “being found out”, why are the opinion polls moving in inverse relation to this apparent fact?
“I think at this stage of a crisis, governments can benefit. A foreign prime minister said to me the other day that while it’s all about trying to take coordinated measures with other world leaders, that looks good for governments. But then after that . . .”
Isn’t it equally possible that Cameron and his colleagues simply underestimated Brown? This provokes the only occasion in the interview when Cameron raises his voice sharply.
“Never! I was asked this question when he was 10 points ahead in the polls, I was asked this question when I was 28 points ahead. I never underestimate my opponents. I don’t think anyone can legitimately claim, in any way, that I’ve taken my foot off the gas for one day in the three years I’ve been doing the job.”
I hadn’t, in fact, accused Cameron of a lack of vigour. Indeed it seems to me that his weekly hectoring of Brown at prime minister’s questions has become increasingly strident and aggressive: how does this square with his claim that on becoming Tory leader he would end “Punch and Judy politics”?
“The idea that there’s a nonconfrontational, more chummy way of doing PMQs, it’s just not the case. I thought it might be possible. I was wrong. I thought maybe it could be different, and actually it can’t be. The fact is, prime minister’s questions is an adversarial occasion. It’s about me asking quite tough questions on behalf of the public. It’s the questions they want answered. And you can’t pull your punches.” Doesn’t Cameron accept, all the same, that the spectacle of him and Brown almost shouting at each other at PMQs over the fate of Baby P was perhaps the best illustration of how this approach alienates the public by producing more heat than light?
“I thought I was asking in a nonpartisan, nonaggressive way a perfectly reasonable question – the reasonableness of which was demonstrated when, four hours later, the government took up my suggestion of an independent inquiry. And I thought that the prime minister’s charge that I was playing party politics over Baby P was completely wrong and appalling and I thought he should withdraw it.”
Which he hasn’t? “He hasn’t. He doesn’t do that sort of thing.”
Vastly different people though Brown and Cameron are, they are both keen students of history. I wonder if Cameron feels that he is in a similar position, albeit in opposition, to Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe in 1981, when 364 economists wrote a letter urging them to stimulate the economy. Thatcher and Howe, unbending, insisted that their overwhelming priority was to reduce Britain’s debts.
“I do study history carefully, but it never repeats itself exactly: there was a much bigger problem with inflation then. I have spoken to Geoffrey recently: he was desperately trying to be fiscally prudent in order to get interest rates down and they kept creeping back up again because the fiscal situation was so bad. My thinking is perhaps more straightforward: I am a fiscal conservative. I believe profoundly in cutting taxes and would like to do it as prime minister. I don’t believe in unfunded tax cuts, just hoping the money’s going to come back.”
So the battle lines are drawn for the next election: adventurous, tax-cutting, risk-taking Gordon Brown versus Mr Prudence himself, dour David Cameron. Who would have believed it?
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