David Cameron: Is it Blackpool or bust?

Telegraph

21 July 2007



If ever a political leader will be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it will be David Cameron in Africa next week. With his party less sure of his leadership than at any time since he took over in December 2005, he desperately needs to restore confidence in his modernisation project.

On Monday, however, as a buoyant Gordon Brown unveils plans for a new house building blitz and prepares to put his Cabinet and the Labour Party on general election alert at a summit at Chequers on Thursday - Cameron will be 4,000 miles adrift from the domestic political action, in Rwanda.

Inevitably, Cameron's critics in other parties will dismiss the trip - during which he will look round an orphanage and speak about global poverty in the Kigali parliament - as yet another empty PR stunt. More alarmingly for the Conservative leader, an increasing number of those beginning to question "Project Cameron" now include senior - and some previously supportive - Tories.

The party has fallen behind Labour in the polls, as Brown, just three weeks into his job as Prime Minister, enjoys a stronger than expected public opinion bounce. In Cameron's inner circle the first signs of tension are developing over the direction in which he is taking the party. Senior advisers are said to be falling out and last night it was confirmed that George Bridges, one of his closest aides, had suddenly quit.

Yesterday, the sense of a mini-crisis enveloping the Tories deepened after the failure to capture even second place in two by-elections; in Labour-held Ealing Southall and in Tony Blair's former seat of Sedgefield. When a party should be powering to victory in every by-election if it is to have any chance of winning a general election, the Tories limped home in third place in both.

In Sedgefield, the Liberal Democrats leapfrogged the Tories into second place. A week before polling day in Ealing, the Cameron high command insisted the party was on course for victory. By Thursday, party workers were almost completely absent, as if they were aware that they were heading for humiliation.

Cameron, who personalised the Ealing Southall campaign by paying five visits to the constituency and describing his party as "David Cameron's Conservatives" on the ballot paper, claimed the share of the vote had held up. But he was clearly depressed by the outcome. "Obviously, I would have liked to have done better," he said.

Tory MPs and advisers are admitting privately that the Ealing Southall campaign was a catastrophe because of the choice of a local "celebrity" candidate, Tony Lit. It emerged last weekend that Lit, who was involved with a local radio station, had recently been photographed attending a Labour fund-raising event with Tony Blair.

The pictures of him alongside the former prime minister allowed other parties to portray him as little more than a smooth, good-looking plant with no firm political convictions and who, as a Sikh, was installed to appeal to the ethnic minority vote.

Harriet Harman, the Labour deputy leader gloated at Cameron's failure. "We have a spring in our step because of what has happened to the Conservatives - because David Cameron actually put his own name on the ballot paper in Ealing and people didn't vote for him."

Privately, even some dedicated modernisers at the heart of Cameron's team who, until very recently had never questioned the way they have been rebranding the party as young, sensitive, caring and cool, are now concerned that it lacks the seriousness necessary to counter the grim, new Puritanism of Gordon Brown's Labour.

Yesterday, a dedicated young "Cameronista" Tory said that it was time for Cameron to stop frolicking in front of the cameras and get down to devising some serious policies and attacking Labour. "People have got the message. Everyone knows we are not nasty party any more. They get that we are soft and cuddly. They have seen the velvet glove. Now they want to see the iron fist inside it."

A senior MP said: "Rwanda always looked a bit like a stunt. Now it looks like a very ill-timed one."

Cameron and his inner circle had certainly expected life to get tougher once Tony Blair was out of office and Brown had introduced a different style and new ideas to Downing Street. Steve Hilton, the Tory leader's chief strategy adviser, always said that "stage one" of an overdue modernisation of the party needed only to convince people that Cameron Conservatives were in tune with the times and compassionate - unlike the prevailing view of the old Thatcherite brand.

Some senior Tories say a lack of "wise old hands" in the leader's office is a real problem for Cameron. In both Ealing and Sedgefield, the Liberal Democrats, masters of by-election tactics, were astonished that the Tories appeared to be taking the voters for granted by predicting victory days before polling day.

Osborne, on a visit to Sedgefield last week, said that the Tories were not playing for second place in the solid Labour seat. He did not mean, however, that they were aiming for third.

Yesterday, Mark Field, a Tory MP, said the party had shown very poor judgment by selecting Lit, who, he said, "first became associated with the party 10 days before the by-election".

The decision had offended local Tories, he argued. "The way in which the sensitivities of local Tory activists were bypassed amounted to contempt towards our supporters and the electorate at large. Building trust and support amongst ethnic groups can never be a quick fix - it has to be the culmination of consistent work and commitment."

The focus will now turn to the party conference season. Somehow, Cameron has to reinvigorate the grass-roots with some truly Tory policy ideas; ones that won't invite Labour and the Liberals to say that the Conservatives are reverting to the "nasty party" again.

A Tory candidate described the party conference in Blackpool - Cameron's second as leader - as "absolutely critical". "We are not in meltdown yet," he said. "But if we keep getting things wrong and making the wrong calls, we soon will be."