When Gordon Brown claimed across the dispatch box in the House of Commons last December that the Conservative Party’s inheritance tax policy was “dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton”, he must have thought he was scoring an easy political point. By-and-large, the coverage of what was at the time the latest round of Prime Minster’s Question Time knockabout showed Brown had got underneath Cameron’s skin. At the time, he succeeded in causing a minor political storm; for the first time since probably July 2007, when Cameron was under fire for a lapse of judgement for going on a trip to Rwanda having neglected to visit his flood-stricken constituency in Witney, political commentators gave Brown victory on points against his nemesis Cameron in the weekly high-noon dual at Westminster. This was a rare moment of upturn for Brown’s public credit-rating at the time of this exchange, having been vindicated with Labour’s handling of the bailout in 2008 in relation to the Conservative’s wrong calls at various times, including their criticism of the nationalisation of Northern Rock in February 2008, which did much to bring into serious question for 18 months thereafter Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne’s credibility and inexperience - called into question over his call for Northern Rock to be allowed to collapse, which would have inexplicably led to a run-on-the-banks at a time of when the financial system was on the brink. Brown's handling of the situation both domestically and internationally, was faintly acknowledged and faintly praised by a media bewitched with the new Tory government in waiting.

The ‘Eton’ comment lingered around the public persona of David Cameron, and to some extent, has done ever since. Cameron responded to the ‘Eton’ comment by complaining that the “petty, spiteful, stupid” line marked the start of a Labour Party-led “class war” against the wealthiest in society. Tory-supported newspapers made a furious defence of Cameron and his shadow cabinet, of which seventeen members were privately educated. Harry Phibbs of the Daily Mail attacked Brown for his “desperate, divisive tactic” of drawing attention to the truth.

What truth would that be? Eton-educated Cameron is a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth, and a direct descendent of King William IV and his mistress Dorothea Jordan. His family made their money in finance and grain. He attended Heatherdown Preparatory School, Eton and Brasenose College, oxford. His wife, Samatha, is the daughter of a baronet and a viscountess, and the Mail has estimated the Cameron’s combined wealth at more than £30 million.

After graduating, alongside Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, heir to the Osborne & Little fabric and wallpaper firm, who enjoyed a similarly privileged education, both men entered the world of politics through the Conservative Research Department (CRD). Cameron joined the CRD in 1988, making an expenses-paid trip to apartheid South Africa. Cameron went on to head corporate affairs for TV boss Michael Green at ITV's Carlton Communications from 1994 while he sought a safe Tory seat. Both Osbourne and Cameron were parachuted into the Conservative seats of Witney in Oxfordshire for Cameron and Tatton for Osborne.

Toby Young, writing in The Mail on Sunday about Cameron and Osbourne’s time together at Brasenose College, Oxford, described Cameron as "a poisonous, slippery individual...a smarmy bully …who operated behind the scenes". Young's account of Boris Johnson and David Cameron's years together at Eton and Oxford, “When Boris Met Dave”, broadcast on Channel 4 towards the end of 2009, recalls how the Bullingdon Drinking Club, an infamous photograph of which has already caused Cameron trouble for highlighting his privileged background, would book restaurants under false names, trash them during drunken parties, then pay off the owners of the establishments. One night the club went on the rampage through Oxford, as described by Young in the Daily Mail: "One of them threw a plant pot through the plate-glass window of a restaurant, triggering the burglar alarm. The police arrived, complete with sniffer dogs, and six of the group were arrested." David Cameron, Young notes, was the "only member of the Buller not arrested". 1

By 1992, Cameron was advising John Major ahead of prime minister's questions. He was special adviser to chancellor Norman Lamont in September 1992 when speculators forced sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and to home secretary Michael Howard in 1993-1994 as Howard expanded private prisons, cracked down on dancing and restricted the right to silence.2


Brief honeymoon

To emphasise how commentators and journalists in the Tory press have made sure Cameron has not had it all his own way, Eurosceptic Journalist Peter Hitchens, who regularly pours scorn on insinuations of Cameron’s heir-to-Blair status, largely out of scorn for what he considers to be the coalescence of New Labour and the New Conservatives as part of the new “liberal elite”, told the BBC: "I think it tells us something about David Cameron that he doesn't much want us to know - that he is not the ordinary bloke that he claims to be." Cameron is viewed unsympathetically by some in the Tory press, dating from his time as head of media relations for TV mogul Michael Green.3

The Daily Mail has described him as saying, "He hated the financial press and we hated him."4

The Daily Telegraph suggested of the same period, "Cameron never gave a straight answer." And the London Evening Standard hailed him as "aggressive, sharp-tongued, often condescending and patronising".5

Cameron has also risked alienating Tory grandees such as former Thatcher advertising guru Maurice Saatchi, who has bemoaned the "say anything to get elected Tories", and his former boss at the Conservative Research Department, Robin Harris, who says, "[Cameron] has no principled sense of direction. [He] would conduct himself on the basis of day-to-day opinion polls."6

The Tory leader is also at risk of embarrassing disclosures - be it about fundraising, his choice of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as press secretary and, most known about, his tax-exile deputy party chairman Lord Ashcroft among others, such as confessed sex-addict Lord Laidlaw, who gave £3.48m to the Conservatives in 2007 despite reneging on his pledge to the House of Lords Appointment’s Commission that he would immediately come onshore for tax purposes on condition of remaining a Lord.



Tory Press rally behind the Cameron project

Unquestioning fervour from the Tory-cheerleading press owned by Rupert Murdoch was observed when ‘The Sun’ publicly declared their support for Cameron on the 30th Sept 2009 - the day after the last day of Labour’s party conference and Gordon’s Brown closing speech – with a front page banner headline 'LABOUR'S LOST IT'. At least one Labour minister is arguing that the media mogul's change of allegiance is related to Cameron's pledge to slim down "by a huge amount" the TV regulatory body Ofcom, which has been threatening to restrict the sports subscription service offered by Murdoch's BSkyB. Murdoch's hatred of the Lisbon Treaty is also an issue: one of the key reasons why Murdoch fell out with Labour is that Tony Blair promised a referendum but went back on his word. Cameron did promise a referendum, but after the Irish referendum result voted in favour of the treaty, the Tories backdowned on their demand of a referendum on the justifiable grounds that the treaty had now been ratified by virtue of the Irish vote, and so, because of this, it would now be pointless to have a referendum about something which now been ratified.



Cameron’s Judgement

Since the day Gordon Brown announced the day of the forthcoming General Election, there has been little media focus and scrutiny of David Cameron’s policies in any depth, echoed in the relative lack of media scrutiny of controversies surrounding Lord Ashcroft in the Tory press, as well as the virtual silence over the controversy surrounding Lord Laidlaw. Serious questions about the Tory’s leadership were exposed after the news that Lord Ashcroft was non-domicile was finally revealed at the start of March; such questions across the media, however, failed to simultaneously question how the Tory leadership had singularly failed to answer questions about the Tory’s leading fundraiser’s tax status for nearly ten years through both obfuscation and blatant avoidance in answering questions on the issue. The revelation, as was long suspected but never confirmed, that Ashcroft was not paying any UK tax despite giving a written undertaking - a "clear and unequivocal assurance" – that he would take up permanent residence in the UK which resulted in Downing Street’s approval of his peerage, put into question the judgement of the Tory leadership in having accepted such a large amount of money to support their election campaign. This revelation was especially awkward for William Hague who was party leader when Ashcroft made the undertaking of his intention to become UK resident once again back in 2000. Even as late as June 2009, William Hague, interviewed on Newsnight declared that: "I have no reason to think that he hasn't complied with the commitments that he made." This ducking of responsibility for being accountable for checking on their Tory’ benefactor’s adherence to personal guarantees he entered into, in tacit agreement with the Tory leadership, in effect amounted to obsfuscation of the highest degree. For Cameron, the new revelation were damaging , primarily because of the question of judgement over the money issue, but also because the Conservative leader was hailing a change in the law to make parliamentarians full UK taxpayers. However, the extent of Tory-allegiance across the tabloid press in the UK ensured that this turbulence never escalated into a full-blown storm. All news media, largely reactive to events in the Westminster village that themselves become stories thanks to the relative weight of exposure they receive in all other sections of the news media, took up the issue as long as it remained a ‘media event’ in the press with the ebb and flow of further revelations on the story, until the story gently subsided and, after some time, gently floated away from central view.

However, a combination of the slight introduction of class politics with the “Eton” comments, plus this stink around Ashcroft, led to the Tory lead in the opinion polls shrinking by several percentage points coming a few months into 2010.



Shortcomings and the Tory’s media free-ride

With the biggest weapon in the Tory’s armoury being exploiting and concentrating on the unpopularity of Gordon Brown, Cameron has been able to use this media scrum around Brown’s failings and select number of policy failures to hide from any media scrutiny himself. Project Cameron has seized the opportunity to tailor a sophisticated public image as the complete antithesis to Brown’s staler public persona, cultivating a new dynamism with a recycling of Blair’s original soundbite politics. However, in this media scrum for personality politics over policy detail, Cameron has been allowed room to manoeuvre to avoid having to explain policy detail, such as explaining apparent contradictions which his and George Osbournes’ public pronouncements have yielded. A prominent example of this has been the relative lack of critique of Cameron and Osbourne’s toeing and frouing over how to deal with the deficit, swinging widely between.Osbourne’s original claim that, in the post-financial meltdown/post-bailout environment and with the need to substantially cut the government deficit, the UK had entered an ‘age of austerity’, to Cameron’s statement in the New Year where he conceded that there would be a danger in cutting the deficit too fast without acknowledging that this has been Labour’s post-bailout economic policy. Cameron and Osbourne’s opportunist policy announcement immediately before the general election that they would reverse Labour plans to increase the national insurance rise by laying claim to reducing government waste beyond Labour’s own target for efficient savings (which itself have been viewed as imaginary in part by economic experts such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies), reveals a even deeper deception and a gulf between popularist rhetoric and substance, opening up the question of their honesty and authenticity with how they plan to maintain public services and exaggerations as to the extent of efficiency savings they can make on top of Chancellor Alistair Darling’s £11 billion worth of savings which he outlined in Labour’s pre-budget report in March. The Tory leadership’s credibility gap was first exposed during the financial bailout when George Osbourne inexplicably, rather irresponsibly and quite spectacularly got it wrong when he claimed nationalisation was the wrong option for dealing with Northern Rock, indicating that the bank should be allowed to collapse which would have led to a run-on-the-banks. Ever since, pressure mounted on George Osbourne, which he did well to overcome through astute highly-political policy moves, such as reversing the government’s national insurance rise (though it comes with additional questions of authenticity about Tory economic policy in general as well, which have been neglected by the press in favour of the attention-grabbing headlines surrounding the ‘tax-on-jobs’ – the preference being for headline-grabbing populism ahead of considered policy analysis).

This relative lack of scrutiny of Tory policies has persisted over the last few years. Post-analysis after the last TV debate between the 3 party leaders on the BBC on Thursday 29th April, completely avoided covering in both the TV and tabloid media how Cameron consistently avoid answering direct questions from Gordon Brown about the Conservative's inheritance tax policy and the Tory Party's proposal to end investment allowances for manufacturing industry in order to reduce corporation tax.

A common thread can be traced through public pronouncements from the Tory leadership dressed up as slick soundbites to transform the public appeal of the New Conservatives, such as Cameron’s famous pronouncements in the field of social policy such as declarations to “hug a hoodie’, use of phraseology to build a contextual analysis which re-asserted Tory claims within social policy that distanced them from Thatcher’s “no such thing as society”, with phrases such as “the broken society” and the new, albeit vague “big society” (which the Tory leadership have struggled to translate into any kind of tangible policy detail in the election campaign).

Elections are a huge political arena that dominate the media, popular culture and everyday debates at work across society. This 2010 general election has already taken in debates on everything from the crisis to immigration. It is a myth that people are so disillusioned with official politics that most won't vote. In fact the majority of the population do vote in general elections. The turnout for the 2005 general election at 61.1 percent was up on the turnout in 2001 of 59.4 percent. This year, due to the huge interest in the 3 live televised debates between the 3 party leaders, which has attracted the interest of many more young people, voter share will be even higher on May 6th. With a large number of voters still said to be undecided up to a few days before the general election, despite the pro-Tory tabloids chest-thumping for a Cameron majority with the Tories ahead in polls (though their lead has narrowed sizeably since the middle of 2009), the result of the forthcoming election is hard to predict. Additionally, and much remarked upon, has been how, because of the live TV debates between the 3 party leaders, Nick Clegg has stolen David Cameron’s thunder as the new fresh-face of British politics, to the Tory’s detriment in the polls. Clegg was widely acknowledged to have come out the best across the 3 television debates. Commentators reviewed Cameron’s performance as having been subdued; rumours circulated that this was because focus groups had informed Tory strategists that voters do not like negative point scoring Punch-and-Judy politics. As a result, Cameron laid off personal attacks of Gordon Brown in the debates, unlike how he conducts himself across the dispatch box in the House of Commons, where each Wednesday the spectacle of the Punch-and-Judy political knockabout - long established in the UK’s political heritage – was evident in which Cameron took up the challenge with great gusto, regularly goading Gordon Brown, despite Cameron’s public proclamation upon first becoming leader of the Conservative party that he wanted to see an end “an end to Punch-and-Judy politics”. Again, it speaks volumes of the discrepancy between public pronouncements which Cameron makes with great fanfare, and the actual reality. He claims that a Conservative government will “get the economy moving again”, but, despite plans to cut corporation tax, will fund such a proposal through getting rid of the much more targeted investment allowances for the manufacturing industry which has been a indispensable help to struggling companies in giving them a guiding rope out of the quagmire of economic recession, and out of step with every other major economy in the world, currently plans to reduce government expenditure with haste, which both Labour and the Lib Dems claim will put the fragile recovery at risk.



General Election 2010

If Cameron wins on May 6th, he will be “the UK’s first Generation X prime Minster”, as well as Eton's 19th prime minister - the first to win a general election since Harold Macmillan in 1959 (Matthew d'Ancona, The Daily Telegraph, 4/5/2010). It is his public identification with a new generation of forty-somethings which is of appeal to a huge swathe of middle-class Brits. Project Cameron’s modernisation of the Conservative party, largely window-dressing, has also no doubt has an impact of public perceptions. However, public poll ratings for Cameron remain underwhelming; the Eton factor, a perception of the old-Tory super-rich in the shadows and the perception of a hint of insincerity in Cameron’s holier-than-now persona with the ultra-stage managed public appearances and gleaming-faced airbrushed posters is detected with the discrepancy between things Cameron says and reality, such as the suggestion of a sun-gleaming future as compared to the reality of what is expected (ie. public service cuts). That Cameron ditched the ‘age of austerity message’ going into the election campaign in order to retain positive messages is no surprise, and it will justify policy decisions to be made in the future that it is a matter of public record that George Osbourne outlined this policy framework before. However, the appearance of Cameron is also of one who is opportunist to the ninth degree, as compared to Brown who, despite all his failings, chiefly his communication shortcomings such as what appears like a false clownish grin everytime he smiles, demonstrates how he is a conviction politician rooted in social justice, as was witnessed at the UK Citizens event in London on Tuesday.

Cameron’s mastery of oratory is not so easily matched by his grasp of policy, as can sometimes be observed across the dispatch box against Gordon Brown when Brown quotes back forensic details to Cameron, which Cameron in response regularly largely ignores, instead using ornately constructed elocution and barbed-wire putdowns to brush past any awkward questions he cannot answer or seeks to avoid answering, as happened in the last TV debate on BBC1 last Thursday 29th April. This gap between public image and detailed analysis is pronounced once people delve further into some of the Tory’s policies. This is rendered as significantly reflective of David Cameron himself since the Tories insist on having the Cameron brand at the heart of the New Conservatism, mainly because it is. Johann Hari in the Independent has identified how in the workplace, David Cameron is promising to “dismantle the very weak health and safety protections currently in place, and replace them with a system where corporations will be able to "organise their own inspections", carried out by a team of their choice.” Critics such as the construction union UCATT claim such measures will directly lead to an increase in deaths in the workplace of construction workers. Meanwhile, on the proposal to cut Labour’s flagship policy of Surestart, an initiative which has received praise across the social policy and education fields, Hari says: “Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, dismissed SureStart as "a microcosm of government failure". Now he says he will keep it in some form, but already he says huge chunks of its budget will go to other things, and few expect it to survive long. If he can't keep the single best policy for reducing inequality – one that costs less than nothing in the medium term – what shreds of progress can survive his rule?” 7

With an election too close to call on Thursday, it remains to be seen who will be outright winner in terms of numbers of seats in Parliament. However, despite it being a big ask from the outset to get a 7% swing to get a Tory majority, with the unpopularity of Brown combined with the recession and the voter’s blame of the government getting into the crisis in the first place for not regulating the banks, in Conservative circles, Cameron will have been seen to have failed in not getting a winning majority in the new House of Commons. Victory was largely viewed as being there for the taking in this election. Failure would have opened up a litany of accusations over bad judgements made such as over Lord Ashcroft, the lack of credibility over their answer to the financial crisis whilst it happened , and a general questioning of whether the ‘Etonian’ element may have been a presentational issue for the party which, if speculated here, would have proved to have been too steep a hurdle to cross to achieve the last one or two digits in the necessary swing required for an outright Tory victory.

However, in light of the unpopularity of Gordon Brown, anything less than a Conservative majority has been viewed as failure. Behind the scenes, there have been rumblings of discontent about how the campaign has been handled at Conservative Central Office.

To the rescue has come the Lib Dems in a coalition government, which is probably the settlement which best reflects the election result which gave not one party it's overall endorsement, while systematically rejecting Gordon Brown. Clegg and Cameron -Thatcher's children, come to the fore...




References:
1. Let me tell you the secret behind the Bullingdon posturing of David and Boris: Oxford contemporary looks behind that decadent image, by Toby Young
Ref:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1201536/Let-tell-secret-Bullingdon-posturing-David-Boris-Oxford-contemporary-looks-decadent-image.html#ixzz0n3miV5nI
2. Return of the Nasty Party, by Ian Taylor
Ref:  http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11184
3. Op cit Ref 2
4. Op cit Ref 2
5. Op cit Ref 2
6. Op cit Ref 2
7. Johann Hari: Cameron is concealing his inner Bush, Fri 30th April 2010
Ref:  http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-cameron-is-concealing-his-inner-bush-1958432.html