Prime minister places himself in tradition of Super-Mac by describing deficit reduction plan as One Nation Conservatism
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David Cameron showed Harold Macmillan is his political hero when he said he leads a One Nation Conservative party. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
Harold Macmillan would probably have been disappointed to learn that it would take 51 years after his election victory in 1959 for another Etonian to be elected (sort of) as prime minister.
But the old showman would no doubt have been delighted to hear that he would be a hero to that prime minister who was 20 when Macmillan died in 1986.
In his column today Benedict Brogan rightly points out that Macmillan is David Cameron's political hero.
The prime minister showed, in one of the most important lines in his speech, how he is governing in the tradition of Macmillan when he said:
This is a One Nation deficit reduction plan – from a One Nation party.
The message from the prime minister was designed to deliver an uncomfortable messages to two audiences:
• The Tory right who hope he will cut taxes at the earliest opportunity. George Osborne made clear to Brogan at the weekend that he and Cameron would resist this when he said:
A country with an almost double-digit deficit cannot add to its deficit in the middle of a sovereign debt storm to cut tax, presumably on a temporary basis, because you would have to then put it back up again to deal with the deficit. I don't think Britain has the fiscal luxury to do that sort of thing. Tax cuts should be for life not just for Christmas.
• The Labour party which believes the deficit reduction plan is reckless. Cameron hopes to deflect Labour criticisms that he is uncaring by persuading voters that he comes from the tradition of Tories who returned from the trenches of the First World War and set to work helping the poor.
Macmillan was so horrified by the effects of the depression in the north east that he set out a personal manifesto, in the Middle Way in 1938, on how to avoid mass unemployment. This is what Vernon Bogdanor wrote in his Guardian obituary of Macmillan:
In domestic policy, Macmillan's central concern was to avoid mass unemployment. As MP for Stockton between the wars, he had learnt "lessons which I have never forgotten. If, in some respects, they may have left too deep an impression on my mind, the gain was greater than the loss." In the 1930s, he had been an advocate of planning and his book The Middle Way, published in 1938, laid the foundations for a form of society neither socialist nor classically capitalist, but combining freedom of enterprise with public control so as to secure the benefits of both.
There is one other key lesson for Cameron from Super-Mac: how to embody optimism. Macmillan famously declared in 1957 that Britain had "never had it so good" after the boom of the 1950s. Cameron wants to embody a new "can-do" optimistic era. But there is no boom to help him on that front.
The prime minister's speech will offer some comfort for Kenneth Clarke who has been irritated over the last 48 hours by Catgate. At the same Daily Telegraph fringe on Tuesday where he mocked Theresa May, the justice secretary also said the Tories only win when they occupy the One Nation centre ground:
I always describe myself as a One Nation Conservative. I have the disappointing feature in politics of having been consistent over most my political career. I was always regarded as wet when we had wets and drys.
It was when we move too far to the right that we found it impossible to do anything but cheer up 30% of the population and got nowhere near winning an election. I always think it is my wing of the party that ever got us into power.
Clarke said that his political hero was Iain Macleod, the father of modern One Nation Conservatism, who died in July 1970 at the age of 56 after just a month as Edward Heath's chancellor. Macleod, who never forgave Enoch Powell for his Rivers of Blood speech, was regularly hailed as a hero by the wets. A Cameron endorsement of Macleod may, therefore, be a step too far.