Within a year, the sustained period of economic growth Britain enjoyed under Blair came to a crashing halt, pushing the country into deep deficit and calling into question Labour’s spending record over the past decade. Factor in the dour mien of Blair’s replacement (Gordon Brown could not be further from the twinkling salesman who’d been occupying 10 Downing) and it all amounted to a ray of hope for Conservatives.
Meanwhile, within his own party, Cameron had plain old opposition fatigue working in his favour. “They had lost two elections very badly and they were starting to think, ‘crikey, maybe the problem is us,’ ” says James Hanning, deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday, and co-author of Cameron: The Rise of the New Conservative. Paying lip service to the Euro-skeptics would now be enough, says Hanning, while vocal support for state services like the National Health Service was no longer heresy. “Most Conservatives just like the idea of winning elections, and once it looked like Cameron was going to do that for them, they became less concerned about what he would do when he got there.”
Still, only a leader as deft as the 43-year-old Berkshireman could have tugged the party of Thatcher from its ideological hobby horses. Cameron’s reassurance that the Conservatives will “protect front-line services and the neediest” would have been anathema to Tory values before Cameron won the leadership race in 2005. His promise to cap immigration in the “tens of thousands” (well below the net inflow of 200,000 per year) would have prompted howls of outrage from pressure groups outside the party. This spring, both were election talking points that helped propel the Conservatives into minority government, where they formed a coalition with the left-leaning Liberal Democrats. “Cameron is not an ideological conservative,” explains Vernon Bogdanor, the PM’s friend and former politics tutor at Oxford, in a recent interview with Prospect magazine. “He has small-l liberal instincts on matters like race. He is a tolerant, liberal-minded person.”
That’s the part that came naturally. Identifying with average citizens is something Cameron—born to wealth and schooled at Eton—had to learn. Hanning’s co-author Francis Elliott describes the Conservative leader’s persona as “glassy,” noting that his wife, Samantha (herself an aristocrat), has reportedly persuaded him to leaven his “pat, pre-baked” style with expressions of sympathy, urgency and in some cases anger.
But even more important has been the extraordinary effort Cameron dedicates to the nuts and bolts of party-building. No puppet of backroom strategists, he was reportedly the prime mover in rewriting the party platform and assembling the team of young modernizers who returned the Tories to relevance. “His term was ‘detoxifying the brand,’ ” says Hanning. “They were seen as the nasty party, and they were quite socially conservative in their views on things like homosexuality. In this case, the change has very much come from the top.”
It all invites juicy comparisons to a certain Canadian party leader who at one time was seen as the lodestar of a Liberal resurgence. Michael Ignatieff, a patrician by birth and inclination, may yet exert the sort of sway over his party that Cameron did his. But at 63, he’s not exactly a fresh young face, and for now he seems to be biding his time. Since the party rubber-stamped his ascendency to the leadership in late 2008, the former Harvard scholar’s boldest step has been to lead a “Thinker’s Conference” last March in Montreal, where the yearning for some grand policy vision was almost palpable.
Wary, perhaps, of pre-empting that vision, Ignatieff has been content to pick around the policy margins. His closing speech to the conference included a promise to cut the deficit by freezing corporate tax cuts planned by the Harper government, while declaring the Liberals “the party of the network”—hazily defined as an organization that favours ties with provinces, NGOs and corporations over expansion of the federal state. The concept may prove too elusive for use on the stump. But it’s one way of mitigating the party’s reputation as an agent of Big Government without appearing overly conservative.
Just as Cameron played down his blue-blood pedigree, Ignatieff has tried to neutralize his image as a privileged intellectual. Though born into a family of diplomats and educated at Oxford, the Liberal leader sprinkles his public addresses with references to his grandfather’s farm, while deploying homey metaphors at every turn. Some work better than others. His scripted appearances to promote a platform for rural Canada have generally played well. His call during last year’s economic downturn “to dig this truck out of the ditch” was clangingly inauthentic. Folksy, it seems, is not his strong suit.
And in fairness, harsh electoral reality may prevent the Liberals from taking the sort of decisive steps that would bring Ignatieff Cameron-style recognition. A sharp swing to the right might win plaudits in the freedom-loving West and parts of Ontario, but it would weaken support in Toronto, Montreal and Atlantic Canada—the party’s last remaining strongholds. Quebec constitutes an even greater challenge because of the Bloc’s near-stranglehold on one-sixth of the seats in the House of Commons, a situation unthinkable in Westminster. “Take 50 seats out of the equation, and it’s very hard to get to a majority,” says Sen. David Smith, a Chrétien loyalist who has held key positions in several Liberal election campaigns. “That would be a problem no matter who the leader is.”
Smith does, however, draw hope from recent events in Britain; the last-hour retreat from the Liberal Democrats, a third-place party akin to Canada’s New Democrats. As recently as a week before the May 6 election, he notes, Nick Clegg’s party appeared poised to join the established powers as a potential government, which could well have consigned Labour to its own long banishment. But on election day, discontented Brits ran back into the arms of the established parties, leaving Clegg with five fewer seats than he won in 2005. “The voters seemed to understand that, if you don’t like the party that’s in, there’s only one party you can expect to replace them,” concludes Smith. “That gives me some degree of optimism.”
As a peg for Liberal aspirations, it doesn’t seem like much. This was, after all, a party that once blew away opponents like they were campaign signs in an autumn wind. Now, as it waits for its leader to chart a new course—or for the current government to wear out its welcome—Canada’s “natural governing party” will take what encouragement it can find.
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