Tonight:
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Roll up for the Dave and George show. Dave is practising to be Prime Minister. George is Dave's right-hand man — but determined to be seen as his own.
The Shadow Chancellor's Guardian interview this week was revealing in just how keen he is to draw distinctions. “It was a cosmopolitan and metropolitan upbringing ... not a life of sort of, landed estates,” he says of his untroubled urban youth. Unlike, we understand, the leader's inner circle in which there is always a big house in a shire and a shoot going on somewhere in the background.
So in the week that Mr Cameron was being feted at the launch of Dylan Jones's Boswellian introduction to his thinking on life, the universe and everything, Mr Osborne was also having a “me” moment. “I didn't want the job of party leader,” he explains (though as I recall events, it took him a little while to work this out and the outgoing Tory leader Michael Howard thought he did).
But the point is clear; no TB-GB-style tensions after a Granita deal unravels. This duopoly will rule harmoniously.
Already, it runs productively. It fell to Mr Osborne to signal one of the most important and far-reaching shifts in pre-election Opposition policy this week, when he backed off a commitment to match Labour on public-service spending. The move is not, as the Right of the party silently prays, about preparing the ground for tax cuts. “We've said we won't do up-front unfunded tax cuts and that's even more true now than when we first said it,” says an insider.
What insiders are coyly calling the “tonal change” is intended to shift the precepts of the Tory economic argument in another way.
The message is that belts must be tightened, including by a future government. I deduce from this that Mr Osborne is preparing to ride out any bribes or sweeteners Labour may produce in its autumn offensive.
He wants to change the default conversation about tax and spend from “Oh no, the Tories are cutting your public services” to “Labour's irresponsible spending means higher taxes for you — and no better services because they waste your money”.
Will it work? It is better than trying to motor on with the old Osbornomics based on “sharing the proceeds of growth” when there might be no or little growth for some time. The shadow chancellor is in part a victim of his own short-term tactical brilliance this time last year. He derailed Mr Brown's election with the inheritance tax relief plan that will benefit relatively few voters and cost an awful lot in lost revenue — an albatross of a pledge he has to honour. Some further spending promises have crept in: notably on building new prisons and funding more police on the beat.
Labour will argue that the shift will start to make voters suspicious of what a Tory spending pledge really means.
How this argument works out is vital to the next election: Mr Cameron relies on his shadow chancellor coming up with a response to the hardship which is credible and durable. Indeed, the two men have spent much of the summer hammering out the rudiments of a “fiscal framework” intended to shore up confidence in the Opposition as competent to rescue Britain from the economic doldrums.
No one who spends time around the Tory leader and his shadow chancellor's office next door can have much doubt about the frequency of contact and the sense of a shared project. That is vital to the New Tories' stability. One early sign that the Blair-Brown double-act was destined for trouble was that more and more conversations were transacted through aides, and economic control was exclusively hived off to Mr Brown, creating a separate fiefdom.
The political contrasts between these two are telling. Mr Osborne has greater appeal to those who admire intellectual clarity; he is determinedly Atlanticist, even through the rough times, and he has helped put some iron in Mr Cameron's soul on foreign affairs. He also cultivates a circle which is ideologically varied. Mr Cameron clearly enjoys his retreat to Planet Oxfordshire at weekends, while Mr Osborne emphasises an eclectic bunch of friends which includes the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly.
The party leader is more attuned to small-c middle England and voted for reduction in the abortion terms and more restraints in IVF. Mr Osborne is happier to declare himself a “social liberal”.
As their differences are in the open, they do not fester — though they have caused some tension and mixed-messages on the size of the planned “marriage rebate” which Mr Cameron's colleague would prefer to keep on the symbolic side, to avoid alienating unmarried couples.
What can trip up the golden couple? They do have their smug moments. Mr Osborne wrote a diary item recently in which he pointed to rising inequalities and lack of social mobility under Labour and claimed that the Tories were winning the argument about who would create a fairer Britain. “Judging by the reaction to my speech,” he concluded modestly of his contribution, “We are winning it.” Well, that's a bit previous, George.
Emphatically, the Conservatives have not won an argument about greater fairness — not least because they backed off a serious treatment of the social mobility trap after the grammar school row. As easy as it is to say that inequalities have widened under Labour (and inequalities of income between the bottom and the middle earners have in fact narrowed as a result of its redistribution), there is no obvious tenet of the New Conservatism which so far suggests that they would not continue to widen — or indeed, widen more, after a change of government. The impact of technological advances on inequality challenges all modern democracies. It's glib to suggest that failures are just another bad thing about Mr Brown.
All parties carry their Achilles heels into battle. Occasionally, the New Tories exude sense of entitlement which undermines their better efforts. Who thought, for instance, that it was a good idea to parade a lot of still-callow candidates in a glossy Tatler shoot, predicting they would be running the country just as soon as they got out of their expensive borrowed evening dress? The sense of presumption is monstrous: these are Sheffield Rally moments Mr Cameron should clamp down on.
The David and George show is set to be one of the most fascinating in politics, because it throws together two of the most talented politicians of a generation at the head of a confident revival. But whether they pride themselves on being cosmopolitan creatures or enlightened sons of the shires, voters would prefer to think that their new leaders won their trust. They won't like the notion that they simply feel entitled to it.
Reader views (2)
I fear "Archie Andrews" is rather challenged from the neck up. His namesake, I mean, of course !
- Brian Hughes, wales, 02/10/2008 17:15
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Yes its just like the Fast Show with Ted and Ralph. They do balance each other out, the upper class twit and the put-upon working class but wiser worker. Well spotted!
- Archie Andrews, Chiswick, 23/09/2008 14:28
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