When I was at university in the early Eighties a friend called James Lyle decided to write his way out of student debt with a Mills & Boon story. He was not necessarily the most moist-eyed of men – as he later proved by getting into the London Business School – but he was a smart operator – as he even later proved by getting a job at the London Business School. He had heard that Mills & Boon paid £4,000 a novel, an enormous prize for a student in 1981. For weeks, the poor chap would buy as much alcohol as he could afford and force himself to read a romance a night.
As heaving bosom followed manly blush, he worked out the formula for success. Like the readers, the heroine must be relatively humble: a nurse, a secretary or a governess. Like the readers, she mustn’t be too beautiful. By contrast, the hero must be handsome and wealthy. He must also be besotted with a scheming vamp, who was only after his money. In a dramatic moment, the heroine would prove herself. The hero would see that the first Mrs Rochester or Rebecca figure was not for him, and make the heroine happy and rich. The latter was crucial because the readers had once been happy and in love, but now saw the attractions of being rich, too. Lyle even noticed there was always a sex scene in chapter seven: not real sweating and panting but a frisson when a blouse is torn or stocking ripped.
It was pitiful to watch him struggle as he went through the motions. But he followed the recipe with the diligence of a master chef and had every right to expect his reward. Mills & Boon appeared ready to give it to him. They praised his style, they applauded his understanding of the market, they said they wanted more, and then flattened all his hopes by saying that they wouldn’t print his manuscript because “we’re not sure you believe it”.
Twenty-five years on and James Lyle is a prosperous manager of a hedge fund with offices in Manhattan and the City. According to the Register of Members’ Interests, he is now funding David Cameron. You can ask the same question of the new Conservative leader as the Mills & Boon editor did of my old friend: you are very good, almost convincing, but do you really believe it?
I’m the last pundit on the planet with the right to offer an answer. Before the Conservative leadership election, I dismissed him in the New Statesman as a hopeless Blair clone – “Blameron”, the headline writer called him – who was stuck in the Nineties parroting the exhausted soundbites of Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould. He would disappear without trace, I assured you. The impact of my piece was electrifying. Within weeks, Cameron had won the Tory leadership by a landslide and taken the party to its first consistent opinion-poll lead since Black Wednesday. It is not for nothing that I am known as the Fleet Street Nostradamus.
Cameron found success by doing exactly what a Conservative Blair would have done in the same circumstances. He triangulated the centre left by moving into its territory and he welcomed interesting and iconoclastic figures – Bob Geldof, Zac Goldsmith – into the Conservative version of Blair’s “big tent”. The Cameron Tories talk sensibly about the environment and Africa and quite bravely, for reasons we shall get to, about civil liberties. Meanwhile, they have become the political equivalent of Jehovah’s Witnesses for workers in modish causes. There the bleeding-hearted are, sitting in their office at Friends of the Earth or Christian Aid, quietly minding other people’s business, when the intercom goes and they hear the most unlikely sentence in the English language: “We’re from the Tory party and we’ve come to help.” I was speaking the other day to the usu-ally courteous Patrick Holden, the director of the Soil Association, and he was making it as clear as he could with- out being rude that he wanted me off the phone. He explained that David Cameron was coming to a reception and he didn’t want to miss one minute of the spectacle. I could hear the excitement in his voice. Alongside Monty Don, the apostle of organic gardening, the Greens’ Caroline Lucas, the apostle of organic farming and Rosie Boycott, the apostle of organic cannabis, would be the leader of the Conservative Party. The novelty value should not be underestimated.
Nor should the political value. One Conservative thinker explained it to me like this. His party was the oldest and most effective in Europe because if the price of power was swallowing its principles then it would gulp them down like a teenager rushing a meal. After the terrible defeat in 1945, the Conservatives promptly accepted Labour’s welfare state and were back in office in 1951. Tony Blair presented them with a far trickier conundrum. If David Cameron believes anything, he believes that the old ruling class produces the best rulers of the country. But what change did he have to acknowledge to return the natural rulers of the country to office? The answer was a change in style rather than substance. They had to show that they accepted Britain as it was. Hence the well-publicised visit to Brokeback Mountain – the most public sign you can make at the moment that you are a Good Person – and Samantha Cameron giving birth on Valentine’s Day – a story that Mills & Boon would never have dared publish.
The logic of the argument is impressive. There are plenty of natural conservatives in marginal seats who regard recycling or their visits to the organic market as duties – even spiritual duties, if that doesn’t seem too high-flown. The old Tory party appeared to mock their beliefs and needlessly lost their support. As the Conservative writer Peter Oborne emphasised in his book Alastair Campbell: new Labour and the rise of the media class, it is also true that you have to observe conventional pieties if you are going to get a fair hearing in Britain. It did William Hague no good that he was right about the European single currency. To be anti-European was to be beyond the pale in his time as Tory leader, and if the price of stopping the incredulous questions on the Today programme and the endless gags on the satirical shows is eating a veggie burger and catching a gay movie, I can see why Cameron thinks it is a price worth paying.
Yet however wrong I was before Cameron’s election, I still wonder whether it is possible for a Conservative leader to imitate Tony Blair. The first doubt comes from the great ideological convulsion of our time: the defeat of the old left. It is far harder to run an ideologically light Conservative Party in 2006 than an ideologically light Labour Party. Those on left and right who maintain that Tony Blair took control of Labour in a Leninist coup and then forced cowed backbenchers to do his bidding fail to take account of the death of socialism. If in 1997 Jeremy Corbyn had been PM, and the Campaign Group had taken every seat in the cabinet, they still wouldn’t have nationalised the banks and the top 100 companies because the belief that public ownership of the means of production was a viable method of running an economy had just gone.
If you were to take a random selection of today’s Conservative MPs, let alone a selection from the right of the party, and give them a huge majority, however, they would slash taxes and regulation and clamp down on crime and immigration because they genuinely believe in market economics and a strong state.
If Conservatives stop saying so in public, where are the people who don’t listen to the Today programme going to go? There’s the British National Party and the UK Independence Party, neither of which can be discounted any more, and a third option. Everyone apart from a few Tory thinkers has ignored one piece of polling evidence since Cameron took over and started opposing new Labour’s assaults on civil liberties. This shows that Labour now has a huge lead on national security. It would be one of the many ironies of modern political history if, by imitating Blair’s tactics, David Cameron were to drive authoritarian conservatives into the new Labour camp.
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