From a distance, David Cameron looks like one of the world’s
most successful conservatives. He brought his party back to power,
ending its 13-year spell in the wilderness. His politics, he once
told me, were about achieving “liberal ends through conservative
means,” and on schools and welfare those means have been undeniably
radical. He preaches about the danger of debt, and is winning the
argument, with a majority of Brits persuaded of the need for
austerity. From a distance, this charming and charismatic
45-year-old might seem like the perfect conservative poster
boy.
Then there is another view: that Cameron is in fact a flake, who
for all his talk about “dealing with the debt” is increasing it
almost as much as Barack Obama (whom he adores). That, much as
Cameron likes using the military, he is making massive defense cuts
and spending the saved money on overseas aid projects. That he is
lazy and unserious, and has surrounded himself with cronies, making
his government closer to Friends than to The West
Wing. And that his election was not a triumph of Conservatism,
but of spin over principle.
So which is the real Cameron? It’s hard to tell because he does
not lead a Conservative government, but a coalition with the
Liberal Democrats—a tiny, left-leaning party that has 9 percent of
the seats in Parliament. Yet Cameron has handed them 50 percent of
the power. He set up a new governing system call the “quad”: two
Tories and two LibDems who, in effect, decide how Britain is
governed. It’s hard to say it’s going well.
If Cameron loses the next election, his downfall will be traced
to his visit to Washington in March. The British Prime Minister was
offered the full red-carpet treatment, but it was the week before
the Budget, which sets the economic policy for the next year. So
there was a choice: stay in London to get the small print of the
financial package right. Option two involved motorcades, trips in
Air Force One, private tours of the White House, and the star
treatment. To a political junkie like Cameron, it was no contest.
And when he came back, all hell broke loose.
While the Tory high command was off touching the hem of the
president, they had had left the civil servants to get on finishing
off the Budget—the British governmental equivalent of leaving the
teenagers alone with the whiskey and the car keys.
“They threw in their pet schemes, and they weren’t stopped,” one
member of Cameron’s cabinet grumbles to me. The result was an
unpersuasive collection of different micro-policies. A 20 percent
tax was imposed on calorific British pasties (meat pies), a minimum
tax rate was imposed on the rich, crippling charitable donations.
None of this was foreseen, most contradicted Cameron’s core
messages, and all of it left the impression that he doesn’t stand
for anything.
This is untrue. Cameron does have a metropolitan outlook on
life, fashionable friends, a young wife who wears a tattoo on her
ankle, and a wind turbine on the roof of his London flat that
purports to generate electricity. He talks about work-life balance,
and comes across as a man to whom friends and family matter more
than work and politics. But all of this, he argues, means he can do
a better job selling Conservatism to the British public.
His policy is to produce a mosaic of policies to assuage left
and right. For the left, he will double government overseas
aid—even if this means borrowing money from China to give it to
India. He will advocate gay marriage, in an attempt to demonstrate
his party’s modernity. For the right, he proposes to cut the top
rate of income tax from 52 percent to 47 percent, and extend a
voucher system for schools. To the outsider, Cameron’s policy may
be confusingly mixed. But the Prime Minister believes he is doling
out spoonfuls of sugar, to make the Conservative medicine go
down.
The problem is that, so far, it’s been all sugar and no
medicine. On state spending, Cameron has talked about the danger of
the debt while borrowing like a drunken Keynesian. The British
government machine was fed like a foie gras goose by the time he
came to office, having grown by 57 percent over the previous
decade. But Cameron restricted himself to cutting total spending by
just 1 percent a year, hardly a crash diet. “The solution to a debt
crisis cannot be more debt,” Cameron told the House of Commons in
April. Maybe not, but this is precisely his approach: to increase
national debt by 60 percent.
HIS WELFARE REFORM is audacious in scope. Britain is about two
decades behind America in understanding how welfare can incubate
the very poverty it is supposed to eradicate. The rise of
employment in the 13 Labour years was entirely due to a rise in
foreign-born workers, a calamitous economic policy that left a
legacy of deep poverty and 2.7 million on incapacity benefit,
deemed too sick to ever work again. Cameron is having each and
every one of them summoned into a doctor’s clinic to be reassessed
for what work they can do. Anyone who can hold a brush, for
example, could be required to take up work sweeping parks.
While bold, it will take a decade to complete—and Cameron has,
at most, three years on the clock. The British welfare system
controls more lives than many former Soviet states, and this is
perestroika. In the two years that Cameron has been in office, the
same phenomenon has happened: what little employment growth we have
seen is entirely accounted for by sucking in more foreign-born
workers. This is unlikely to change much as long as Britain remains
in the European Union, a membership supported by only a third of
the public. Coalition between Euroskeptic Tories and Europhile
LibDems has rendered the government mute on the subject.
In the end, politicians are judged by what they do rather than
what they say. It almost doesn’t matter how conservative Cameron
is, if he is unable to enact many Conservative reforms. Having a
Tory raise debt with a heavy heart is not much better than having a
socialist do it with zeal. Saying his hands are tied by the LibDems
is not a plausible excuse: their popular support has halved, and
for them, triggering an election would be to volunteer for
annihilation.
Amongst friends, Cameron always spoke as if his second term
would be the one in which he would really enact his Conservative
revolution. But, with the economy flatlining and his poll rating
plunging, it is looking increasingly likely that he will not get
that opportunity.
