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A Major chance for Gordon?

So the Tories haven’t sealed the deal yet. There seems to be a great deal of puzzlement as to why HM Official Opposition isn’t gliding gracefully into the role of HM Government, most of all from the Conservatives themselves. Even Labour seem confused.

Some believe that the Conservatives have been only too ready to sit back and let Labour lose the election, for instance feeding the media frenzy over the Brown bullying allegations last week, rather than just pressing on with the Conservatives’ own agenda. This gave Cameron the double blow of looking opportunist and also losing a chance to push forward Conservative policies whilst Brown was temporarily on the back foot. Much as Cameron wants to paint Brown as the school bully, he is now making himself look like Billy No-mates at the back, shouting out comments that he thinks make him look big and clever.

It appears that Andy Coulson has brought a tabloid mentality to the Tories’ communications. Don’t worry about the policy details, just get the screaming headline. But when Labour were on the ropes, one big punch every now and again was enough to keep them there. Now they have been allowed to struggle back to their feet, Cameron and his party are short on the fancy footwork.

But to me the real problem for the Tories is their timidity. If they have any big ideas, it seems that they are too nervous to propose them. It’s no good going on about change, as if that were in itself a good thing. Change to what? There isn’t even a clear policy on the economy and the need for cuts. Having first talked of large cuts, private polling warned the Tories that there message was not popular. So the ‘cuts’ became ‘modest ­reductions in public spending’, at least for the first year. So voters are left not knowing what the Conservatives would do on probably the most important issue facing the country at the moment, nor with any idea what a Cameron government would do to the public services they and their families rely on.

Maybe the Tories have overestimated how badly people feel about the current economic situation, a point not lost on Michael Portillo. The former Treasury minister said on BBC’s ‘This Week’:  ”This has been a phoney recession for people who have kept their jobs. They have seen their mortgage interest go down, inflation was much lower than they thought it would be when their wages were awarded last year. Lots of people have done quite well.”

So if the Conservatives cannot rely on scaring voters into going blue, what can they do to gain a majority in May? I believe that they still have a lot of work to do on detoxifying the Conservative brand. This morning’s revelations concerning Lord Ashcroft will not have helped them rid themselves of the image that the Tories are still the nasty party, of and for rich people, just like them. They cannot continue to act as if they just need to wait for the ripe majority to fall from the election tree.

Finally, I cannot help but feel that there are strange echoes of 1992. Then most people were just waiting for a Labour majority. But somehow people took fright at the Labour Party, however much Kinnock tried to assure us that he and the party had changed their spots. And the arrogance of the Labour hierarchy, well before the infamous Sheffield rally, was a real turn off.

But the greatest similarity between 2010 and 1992 is the economic situation. And the truth is that voters don’t want to jump ships during stormy weather. Brown may be inept, but he feels safer than the unknown. As Hillaire Belloc put it:

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

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