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Has Cameron at last learnt Blair's lesson that the British are NOT naturally Left-wing?

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As David Cameron prepared for the funeral of one of his greatest predecessors, there was another, less advertised but also significant, signalled exit from the political world last week.

Andrew Cooper, the Prime Minister’s personal pollster who enjoys the title of Director of Government Strategy, was reported as departing his post.

It was said on his behalf that he had long planned to return to work at Populus, the polling organisation he had helped found.

Andrew Cooper's resignation, which has been largely overshadowed by Thatcher's death is likely because he lost out against Lynton Crosby

What is more likely is that he had lost out heavily against Lynton Crosby, the fixer Mr Cameron brought in earlier this year to run the Tories’ election machine.

Clearly, there was no room for both men in the battle for the prime ministerial ear, since their strategic thinking ran on diametrically opposite lines.

Mr Cooper was the ultra-moderniser, the arch-proponent of the signature belief of the Cameroon inner circle that the Conservative brand had to be detoxified of its ‘nasty party’ image.

The Tories would only ever win power again, went this thinking, if the party adopted the preoccupations and attitudes of the ‘nice’, metropolitan Left — of which the most controversial was gay marriage.

Zeal Lynton Crosby knows you cannot win elections without appealing to the true center-ground - which is most certainly not where the Left says it is

Mr Cooper, who mystifyingly appeared to believe with near-religious zeal that gay marriage was the sure-fire route to electoral victory, persuaded Mr Cameron that while this policy would lose the support of older Conservatives in safe Tory seats (boo, hiss), it would attract new voters in marginal constituencies (welcome, nice young detoxifiers!).

In total contrast, Mr Crosby, an Australian no-nonsense political strategist, is controversially accused of formulating a ‘dog whistle’ campaign (so-called because a dog whistle is too high for the human ear and can be used to send hidden messages to certain groups of voters). This is aimed at reinforcing traditional values while listening carefully to the concerns of the conservatively-minded political centre-ground.

Accordingly, he is understood to have criticised the gay marriage policy for alienating the Conservative grassroots.

Indeed, for anyone not to have understood the dangers of traditional Tories reacting furiously and vowing never again to vote Conservative, one would have to have been hermetically sealed in a sound- proofed box supplied only with Guardian articles, Stonewall press releases and the collected speeches of Peter Tatchell on a never-ending audio loop.

Which is broadly where Andrew Cooper seems to have been sequestered for the duration. His prospective departure from No 10 would therefore seem to signify that Mr Cameron has at last understood that the sun, moon and stars do not shine out of every modernising orifice. Hallelujah!

Curiously, we appear to be witnessing the age of the political retread who brings with him the spurned wisdom of a previous period of history.

Mr Crosby worked as the long-term adviser to the Australian Liberal (ie, conservative) politician John Howard, who went on to win four general elections.

Mr Blair knew that to win power, he needed publicly to dump the Left and appeal to conservative instincts on the trades unions, crime, welfare and education. And so New Labour was born

Last week, Labour’s former leader Tony Blair emerged from relative obscurity to mount a stinging attack on his successor, Ed Miliband, for opposing the Government’s welfare changes.

This position, he said, risked reducing Labour to a party of protest out of touch with mainstream opinion. The party needed to get real on issues such as the spiralling housing benefit bill, the need for public spending cuts and the desirability of the education reforms.

His words carried great weight because — like Lynton Crosby — Tony Blair’s genius lay in winning elections. What both these political animals viscerally understand is that you cannot do so without appealing to the true centre-ground — which is most certainly not where the Left says it is.

Mr Blair knew that to win power, he needed publicly to dump the Left. He knew he had to appeal to conservative instincts on the trades unions, crime, welfare and education. And so New Labour was born.

Of course, he proved to be largely unsuccessful. Moreover, he concealed his own radical agenda to transform British culture and identity, for example, through Labour’s policy of mass immigration.

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But like other radical social changes, that was accomplished by stealth. Mr Blair understood that to win power, he had to be seen to go with the grain of conservatively-minded opinion rather than kick it in the teeth. The astonishing thing is that it was a Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who, under the influence of Andrew Cooper and the other modernisers, took precisely that latter course.

Mr Blair said last week that, among the public, there had been no decisive shift to the left. But the Cameroons’ article of faith was that only Left-wing policies went with the grain of public opinion.

So they swore undying commitment to international aid, green taxes and gay marriage. The public’s most deeply felt concerns over Europe and immigration were either betrayed by empty promises or totally ignored. Those policies that did chime with mainstream concerns developed almost by chance. It just so happened that Michael Gove was one of the very few to understand the disaster that had engulfed the education system.

And it also just so happened that in Iain Duncan Smith, there was a minister whose desire to end welfare dependency and restore individual responsibility arose from a patently un-nasty, compassionate desire for true social justice.

Nevertheless, in pursuit of detoxification, Mr Cameron infamously branded UKIP ‘a bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’.  Since UKIP happened to speak for middle Britain, however, Mr Cameron  thus managed to insult his entire  core constituency.

Hysterical

Not that he seemed to care. Egged on by the modernisers, he seemed to take every protest by those core Conservatives as proof he was on the right track. Even when he failed to win the last election, the Cameroons claimed that was because the party had not been Left-wing enough.

Then light began to dawn. When the rise of UKIP suddenly threatened to split the Tory vote very badly, the Government’s rhetoric on immigration, Europe and human rights began to harden.

Labour similarly realised they had lost their own core vote on immigration and adjusted their rhetoric accordingly. But what still stuck in their craw was welfare reform. Despite the fact Mr Duncan Smith’s changes would merely slow down the rate of increase in the welfare budget, Labour and its media cheerleaders mounted hysterical attacks on him for punishing the poor.

The Prime Minister has realised that people that do not want their country to be transformed into an international entrepot of competing tribes, but to identify with the recognisable and shared characteristics of their nation

But this has turned out to be yet another issue where the public are in fact roaring the Government along, with opinion polls showing a massive 70 per cent-plus support for welfare reform. This is what prompted Mr Blair’s attack on his successor.

So how come Messrs Crosby and Blair get this so right while so many on their own side get it so spectacularly wrong?

It is surely because both men instinctively understand — as did Margaret Thatcher — that social aspiration, a sense of fairness and the need for physical security are hard-wired into the human psyche.

Many of the policies that chime with mainstream concerns, like Michael Gove's reform of education and Iain Duncan Smith's reform of the welfare system, developed almost by chance

However, what Mr Crosby also understands, in contrast to Mr Blair’s fixation with the EU, multiculturalism and human rights law, is that people want passionately to govern themselves in accordance with their own historic culture.

They do not want their country to be transformed into an international entrepot of competing tribes, but to identify with the recognisable and shared characteristics of their nation.

Belatedly, Mr Cameron seems to have realised this. But since previously he put himself on the wrong side of these battles, few will now trust him. And that is a  problem that maybe even the genius of Lynton Crosby cannot overcome.

m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk






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