David Cameron will be facing down his critics in Manchester and holding firmly on to the political centre ground
Exactly 30 years ago this month, facing resistance to her economic reforms from within the Cabinet, Margaret Thatcher ejected her principal critics and stacked the government with true believers. Out went the ‘wets’ like Christopher Soames and Ian Gilmour, inherited from Opposition when a broad church was needed. In came the Praetorian Guard of Thatcherism – Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson.
It marked the culmination of Thatcher’s efforts to impose her will on the party. Thatcherites were brought in at every level to ensure that the next crop of senior ministers would predominantly be ‘one of us’. The move transformed the Tory Party and, arguably, the economic fortunes of the nation.
The reshuffle is the most potent weapon in the prime ministerial armoury. But what if he can’t use it? As David Cameron heads off to Manchester for the Conservative Party conference, does he wish he could reshape his administration in his own image; or is he happy to be constrained by the requirements of coalition government from making concessions to the Tory Right?
For all that he won the Conservative leadership parading a Right-wing pedigree on economic, social and European issues, Cameron’s instincts are more those of an old-fashioned, patrician Conservative in the Macmillan mould. His relationship with his Liberal Democrat deputy Nick Clegg is not just one of convenience; he actually welcomes the gravitational pull to the political centre that it involves.
But his party doesn’t. Both in Parliament and in the country the rumblings are growing louder about how long this unholy union can go on. Whether it is tax policy, social reform, human rights laws or telling the European Union where to get off, Conservatives feel the party leadership’s natural inclinations are being thwarted by their coalition partners. How this manifests itself in Manchester will define the rest of the government’s term in office.
The LibDems know only too well that a conference needs to feed on the red meat of party orthodoxy, which is why Vince Cable and others threw their activists a few juicy steaks in Birmingham.
But it depends how far you go. If the Tories spend their conference denouncing everything their partners stand for then the cracks already visible in the coalition will widen significantly.
A pamphlet published recently by a group of new Tory MPs and called After the coalition captured in its title what many of them think of the current arrangement. The fanciful idea was promoted not long after the election by Nick Boles, a close ally of Cameron’s, that the coalition might be a permanent fixture.
Forget it – the question now is whether they can last the course; and the odds against are lengthening.
If the economy fails to respond to the chancellor’s austerity programme, pressure for a Plan B will come not just from Labour and the public sector unions but from the LibDems as well. A shared commitment to an agreed economic policy is the glue that binds the coalition; once it starts to come unstuck there is little to unite them.
They disagree on all the big subjects from immigration to sentencing. Reforms of the police, health and welfare are all potential sources of friction (although Cameron might be wise to put one or two of these on ice). And looming over the whole coalition is the small matter of Britain’s future in Europe, the very question Cameron hoped he would not have to address but which his party won’t let him forget.
Thirty years ago, Thatcher began the process of forcing the Conservative party to share her vision that the voters would respond positively to a radical, Right-wing agenda. But Cameron, like Blair, does not think a modern-day election can be won from anywhere but the centre. If he did have the option of staging a major reshuffle, my hunch is that it is not the LibDems he would want to kick out the door.
Philip Johnston is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph
