For a journalist supposed to be close to the Cameroons, Janan Ganesh daringly broaches the touchiest of subjects – the failure of the Conservative Party to win a majority at the last general election.
To even raise the issue at the Tory top table is to cause a scene that only HM Bateman could have done justice to. But undeterred, Ganesh devotes his column in the Financial Times to 2010 and all that, describing the electoral outcome as the “original sin” to which David Cameron’s current problems can be traced back:
Ganesh offers an alternative interpretation. In doing so he only gets the story half right, but it is a very good half:
This is an absolutely crucial point. The austerity message took centre stage at the 2009 Conservative Party annual conference, and it was from then on that the Conservative lead in the polls began to crumble.
Ganesh doesn’t seek to excuse the “haplessness” of the actual campaign, which he calls a “shapeless farce”; but contrary to what some people claim to remember it wasn’t all about the Big Society (which only “took up a single day in the Tory ‘grid’”). And for all the disruption caused by the TV debates, “the Tories ended it with roughly the same poll lead over Labour as they began it.”
In other words, the chance of a majority was blown in the months leading up to the campaign not during it:
And this is where Janan Ganesh gets it wrong. Yes, austerity was a tough sell, but people were ready to be assured that it was necessary – the only way of leading Britain back to safety after the chaos caused by Gordon Brown and the bankers. But, instead of balancing the austerity message with a ‘security’ message, it was combined with an Obama-style ‘change’ message – as if austerity was something to look forward too and get excited about.
As for the specific slogans and images, they were all wrong too – such as “we’re all in it together” (yeah, right), “invitation to join the government of Great Britain” (huh?) and that bizarre poster of a seemingly air-brushed and botox’d David Cameron (ugh!). To this this day, the Cameroons continue to believe that their economic medicine can be sweetened with more of that “high-minded metropolitan” sugar. But they’re wrong.
Yes, people will vote for fiscal sanity, but after all the recklessness, greed and incompetence of the previous decade, what they want in return isn’t social liberalism, but social justice.