11 Jan 2017

Chalk and Cheese: Six months on it has become clearer how different May and Cameron are

7894539C-CC6C-4689-8DED8AAB2C6494D7.jpg

Six months ago, on 11 July 2016, Theresa May was declared the victor in the Conservative Party leadership contest. Two days later, on 13 July 2016, she replaced David Cameron as Prime Minister. In theory this transition should not have been spectacularly transformative. Not only were both of them members of the same political party but each of them had (with admittedly very different levels of intensity) supported Remain in the referendum campaign and the two did not seem that far apart in where they stood in terms of the Conservative Party spectrum. In her first few days as Prime Minister, however, Mrs May sent multiple signals that she intended to do the business of public administration very differently from her predecessor. The distinction has, if anything, increased. It can be seen through five ‘Ps’: philosophy, priorities, people, presentation and popularity.

Philosophy: One nation, two notions

Both Mr Cameron and Mrs May would be content to describe themselves, in the spirit of Benjamin Disraeli who coined the term (but as a novelist before he was a serious politician), as ‘One Nation’ Conservatives. That phrase refers to the fact that British society is always at risk of being polarised between the rich and the poor and that the task of the Conservative Party is to prevent this from happening. There are, though, substantial differences in how the two see this mission.

The first is that in this, as many other matters, Mr Cameron wore his philosophical thinking pretty lightly. It was a theme rather than a doctrine. In an early interview after he became Conservative leader in 2005 he expressed his suspicion of all ‘isms’ (including capitalism), preferring to see politics as the process of solving problems as they occurred. In so far as he expressed a sense of what he understood ‘One Nation’ to mean it was that the distance between the rich and the poor should not become so wide in monetary terms as to become socially explosive. To that extent he was akin to a diluted Social Democrat or a continental Christian Democrats.

Mrs May, by contrast, as befits her personality, while hardly doctrinaire, takes these things more seriously. For her, the task of a One Nation Tory is to pursue measures that actively assist those among the poor who aspire to be rich. This distinction (and their respective backgrounds) largely explains their division on grammar schools.

Priorities: The Brexit factor

Mr Cameron was destroyed by Brexit, Mrs May will be defined by it. The previous sentence is the essence of contemporary British politics. Although the Prime Minister and her supporters would sincerely insist that there is much more to her agenda than the means by which the UK finally leaves the European Union, the reality is, as most of them will concede privately, that the May era minus the Brexit question is truly Hamlet without the Prince territory. No one will remember, let alone offer applause to, the present Prime Minister for an enlightened approach to corporate governance or an interesting angle on industrial strategy if five years after Brexit occurs it has become stunningly obvious that the UK is destined to be much poorer economically or much less relevant politically. It is Brexit or bust for this occupant of the post of First Lord of the Treasury. She will live and breathe it.

This might make some politicians opt for pragmatism. If anything, Mrs May’s instincts are the opposite. She sees departure as the chance to define what the British people are and who she is. Hence the stress on border control and migration, which was her watchword for six years at the Home Office and what she views as the logical impulse of an island people and its core identity. Anyone who thinks that she is bluffing on her migration ‘red line’ is absolutely deluding themselves.

People: Ying and yang

If an alien had walked around Downing Street and its appointees and occupants in early June 2016 and then returned to do the same activity in January 2017, he or she would have reported back to their home planet that something close to a revolution had happened. Apart from the career civil servants and the police officers, virtually everyone has been changed. The turnover in special advisers in and around Number 10 has been little short of absolute. It is amazing that Larry the Cat has survived.

And her people are as much her people as his people were his people. His people were normally the offspring of very affluent individuals who had attended elite schools as well as elite universities, who were much more comfortable with ‘big picture’ language and had an enthusiasm for ‘ideas that you can see from space’. Her people are the polar opposite. They are much older on average and mostly grammar or state school educated. They share her innate suspicion of ‘Ten Point Plans’ for utterly changing policy outcomes over a comparatively short period of time. They respect formality in terms of the policy process and not the ‘sofa government’ ethos that Mr Cameron shared with Tony Blair. It is the people factor more than anything else that explains why this feels like a hostile takeover.

Presentation: Overkill versus underkill

Mr Cameron and his inner circle worshiped it. Mrs May and her clan have contempt for it. One of the (thousands, possibly millions) similarities between the Cameron camp and the Blair brigade was their mutual belief that politics was a ‘permanent campaign’, that required a daily media ‘grid’ and so a remorseless focus on the ‘message’, feeding the television networks and newspapers with a carefully organised diet of material of Whitehall’s choosing or else the press would be a nightmare.

At one stage when Alistair Campbell was at the height of his powers his media machine was so large that he thought about throwing the Government Whips out of their historic home at 12 Downing Street in order to make room for his enormous empire to operate in more comfort. That notion was duly nixed when, in a cute reversal of roles, the Whips leaked his embryonic plan to a newspaper. The Cameron Downing Street operated on close to the same principle. Presentation was politics.

Mrs May does not agree (to put it mildly). The media ‘machine’ at Downing Street has been scaled back to a level unknown since the 1970s (or earlier). There is no ‘grid’ to speak of. She rations her speeches carefully so that they only involve either really big stuff (such as the one on Brexit that she will deliver shortly) or on issues that she cares about strongly (such as mental health). The age of the PM tweeting on the death of every passing pop star is over.

Popularity: One party, two electorates

Both Mr Cameron and Mrs May were/are popular politicians with the public. The difference is who they are popular with. Both were popular with Conservative voters (unsurprisingly) although Mrs May seems to have relatively higher appeal to lower income Tories while Mr Cameron swept the board with more metropolitan, very high income Conservatives.

The real distinction, nonetheless, is that Mr Cameron was quite well liked by those who aligned with the Liberal Democrats (even before the Coalition was formed in 2010) but never made inroads into the affections of Labour adherents and was the reason why many disgruntled older Conservatives jumped ship towards UKIP.

Mrs May, once again by contrast, has an opposite effect. Liberal Democrats do not have much time for her. Labour voters offer her an atypical level of personal respect. UKIP adherents really, really like her.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If the UK cannot have a real two-party system, it finds it within one party.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


×

Update your login details

We updated our website and supporting systems on 12th December. 

If you previously had an account, please reset your password. If it's your first-time logging in, please register to create an account. For assistance, please contact the BVCA Membership Team

Login