Watershed moment for Dave as the papers turn against Gordon

Roy Greenslade
6 Aug 2008

Call this the silly season if you like. For one man, however, this past week has been anything but silly. It has marked the transformation in David Cameron's media profile from hopeful Opposition leader to genuinePrime Minister-in-waiting.

In the space of little more than a week he has begun to attract the kind of press adulation that Tony Blair received from 1994 until his eventual triumph over John Major in 1997. Cameron has had to wait somewhat longer than Blair to win over editors because of initial suspicions that he had more style than substance, but he appears to have won that battle so successfully that newspapers are now revelling in his style too.

Unless he makes a highly unlikely and unbelievably crass mistake he will surely secure a landslide victory over Gordon Brown in the next general election. This year's Cameron holiday snaps deserve an album all of their own because it was those iconic pictures of him on a beach in Cornwall — playing frisbee, walking and talking to his wife — that mark his emergence as the media's new political luvvie.

The Daily Mail noted the contrast between cool Cameron in his floral shorts and tee-shirt and the “buttoned-up” Brown on a Norfolk walkabout, wearing a tailored, light grey jacket that gave him the appearance of a 1950s dad at the seaside.

Both were posing, of course, during officially sanctioned picture opportunities at the beginning of their summer breaks. But only Cameron enjoyed the benefit because he, unlike Brown, not only managed to look at ease, he gave the impression of being entirely comfortable in his own skin. It was enough to persuade the Sunday Times to run a feature on “the rise of Boden Man”, using Cameron as the main picture in an article about the success of Johnnie Boden's mail-order catalogue business in dressing “the aspirational middle classes who have moved beyond the traditional Tory/Labour divide”. Its overt message was that Cameron appeals to the crossover voters who will decide the outcome of the next election.

But the underlying message of Cameron's recent press emergence is much more significant. It marks the moment at which the negative publicity about Brown and his government has mutated into positive reporting of Cameron.Brown's coverage is reminiscent of that suffered by Major while Cameron's is just like that enjoyed by Blair.

The crossover point has been reached where the press have accepted that Cameron can win on his terms rather than because Brown's Labour have screwed up. Aside from fairly maverick Tory commentators, the same could not have been said about Cameron's predecessors — William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. They were never viewed in most newspapers as genuine contestants for No. 10.

As well as turning himself into an electable commodity, Cameron has also revolutionised his party's public image, a point made on Sunday in The Observer in a piece which asked rhetorically: “So are we all Tories now?” The writer, Carole Cadwalladr, also read more into Cameron's holiday pictures than was superficially apparent. For her, the closeness of Cameron and his wife, Samantha — “looking, for all the world, like the perfect couple” — was only partially testament to the power of spin. It was further proof Cameron's party has “colonised traditional Liberal-Labour territory in an audacious ideological landgrab” which she summed up brilliantly.

Everything she stands for, the so-called liberal virtues of the average Guardian reader, “have become not only part of the Conservative party manifesto but also…posh”. It pained her to say it, but Cameron has made poshness fashionable and acceptable.

By comparison, the hand-wringing of New Labour at the failure of its own policies to change society after 11 years in office seems both incompetent and very definitely unposh. Traditional Conservative-supporting papers may have been uncertain about Cameron in his first year-and-a-half as leader but they have come to recognise his value just at the point when Brown's long-time media backers are deserting him. With polls showing ever-widening gaps between Labour and the Tories — the latest two, in Monday's Independent and The Mail on Sunday, were particularly bad for Brown — previously faithful Brownite journalists are losing faith.

The latest is The Guardian's Jackie Ashley who now says Brown must go. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she wrote. It was impossible to believe that Brown, though “a principled, decent man”, could carry on because he has failed to gain the trust of people outside his circle of cronies.The Observer's Bill Keegan appears to be disenchanted too, and Polly Toynbee is hardly radiating enthusiasm. Instead she is fired up about David Miliband's emergence as a leadership contender.

The Independent, a long-time admirer of Brown, ran a leading article on Monday which contended that the Tories are the only party capturing the mood of the public. Seen in tandem with Bruce Anderson's column, arguing that the Tories have “intellectual and political momentum”, the message to Indy readers is becoming increasingly pro-Tory. Last week it ran a daily assessment of Tory polices under the somewhat sympathetic logo “Preparing for power”.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the daily newspaper sales spectrum, The Sun has been moving steadily towards Cameron for some time.

One paper cannot win or lose an election. But when every paper is carrying the same message, backed up by opinion polls, the answer is blindingly obvious. If Brown stays on, Cameron will win by a mile. On the other hand, he will probably do the same if Brown goes.