David Cameron’s grand riposte

IF NEXT year’s general election were a straight choice between the party leaders, it would be David Cameron’s to lose. That was clear from the Conservative prime minister’s thumping speech to the annual Tory gathering in Birmingham on October 1st. A week after Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, delivered one of the worst speeches of his career, Mr Cameron gave one of his best.

The former PR man is a natural set-piece performer, but often provides more lacquer than depth. In Birmingham, however, he advanced—along with a couple of good jokes and a half-decent impression of William Hague, a retiring Tory grandee—a wide-ranging and, at times, impassioned vision of what a future Tory government would do. It would be austere; Mr Cameron promised £25 billion ($40 billion) of additional cuts in the first two years of the next parliament, especially to the welfare budget. It would be intolerant of shirkers and Islamic extremists, the twin bogeymen of Tory party conferences these days. Yet it would be fair, Mr Cameron insisted, in response to fierce attacks from the left on his austerity policies, with the fruits of fixing Britain’s ravaged public finances to be widely shared.

The budget of the National Health Service (NHS)—which, the prime minister noted poignantly, had cared for his disabled and now deceased young son—would continue to be protected. And there would be tax cuts, at some unnamed point in the next parliament, for 30m people. The biggest would raise the tax-free allowance, liberating anyone earning the minimum wage from income tax. Higher earners would also benefit. With roughly half the cost of the tax cuts to be paid for by freezing working-age benefits, this was not a pro-poor manifesto. Yet Mr Cameron’s more striking proposals, including some lifted from rival parties, were aimed at the sorts of people Tories have often neglected.

George Osborne, the Tory chancellor, had earlier promised a big expansion in apprenticeships; to this Mr Cameron added a promise to end exploitative zero-hours contracts. The Tories also promise to build 100,000 starter homes and subsidise the cost for first-time buyers. By such means Mr Cameron sought to provide an answer to the two-pronged question, regarding the purpose and chief beneficiaries of austerity, which is likely to dominate the election. All this largesse, he said—tax cuts, NHS and all—“is only possible because we have managed our economy responsibly”. On the faces of the “Golden Boys”—a nearby statue of William Murdoch, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, creators of the Industrial Revolution on which Birmingham’s wealth was founded—it was possible to imagine a wry smile.

And on the face of Mr Miliband, a grimace: by promising tax cuts which most Britons want, on the back of the reduced spending they long ago accepted the need for, Mr Cameron has perhaps set the economic agenda for the next government. It will be hard for Labour, which is only reluctantly accepting the need for austerity and has no plans for big tax cuts, to promise less.

The hash Mr Miliband made of his own conference speech, it must be said, was a gift to the Tory gathering. It provided an antidote to a series of low-level but damaging defections to Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), whose march is splitting the Tory vote. It inspired the best line in Birmingham, from Boris Johnson, the ribald Tory mayor of London. Of Mr Miliband’s admission that he had forgotten to mention the deficit in his speech, Mr Johnson suggested, “The baggage handlers in his memory went on strike and refused to load the word “deficit” onto the conveyor belt of his tongue.” More important, a sense of Labour’s vulnerability, which Mr Miliband’s poor performance exacerbated, encouraged Mr Cameron to direct his barbs almost exclusively at his party’s traditional rival, while largely ignoring UKIP.

This was wise, because disaffected Tories cannot be wooed by insults (a truth Mr Johnson, who suggested they were the type of people who had sex with vacuum cleaners, might not have grasped). And pandering to their Eurosceptic views, as Mr Cameron did slightly, for example, by offering a vague and probably unrealisable promise to renegotiate the EU principle of free movement, alienates milder voters. The Tories’ best hope of wooing back “kippers” is to accuse them of ushering in Labour—“Go to bed with Nigel Farage and wake up with Ed Miliband”, as Mr Cameron put it. And this strategy has an additional benefit in having freed him, after vacillating too long, to offer the more liberal vision of Britain that pandering to the right precludes. Against the narrow English nationalism bubbling in UKIP’s ranks, the mantra of Mr Cameron’s speech was an inclusive-sounding promise to “build a Britain that everyone is proud to call home”.

Now show you mean it

It was a good day for the prime minister. Yet he has made good speeches before; and this one also pointed to frustrating flaws in his leadership. Love the NHS as he may, Mr Cameron said nothing about the vast, costly and perhaps fruitless health-care reforms his government has undertaken. Neither did he mention the justice, welfare and police reforms it has to varying degrees bungled or aborted, and for which his own wavering grip is ultimately to blame. The result of these failures is that Mr Cameron has now a record of promising more than he delivers. His government’s serial over-estimation of its progress in cutting the deficit is another example, which might make the promised tax cuts seem either uncertain or unwise. A more formidable opponent than Mr Miliband would savage the prime minister for this.

It is too late to fix the Tories’ lacklustre reforms, but not for Mr Cameron to demonstrate the concentration and drive his party craves of him. In the form he showed in Birmingham, pugnacious yet still moderate, even the Tories’ virulent Eurosceptics, who dislike the prime minister, will bow to him. They would prefer a more hardline leader. But mostly they want a winner.