Cameron: the last of the Blairites...

The neo-Georgian Prime Minister

BY JOHN GRAY


By the time he stands down, David Cameron's Britain will be neo-Georgian – a country that is, in effect, governed by a coterie of wealthy families competing for power.

What is emerging isn’t exactly Thatcherite, or neoliberal. Instead, it is a variety of mercantilism, with government not retreating from the marketplace but actively reshaping it so that it better serves the interests of trade and wealth accumulation.

An endearing story has it that when the aged Stanley Baldwin was asked at a meeting which ideas had influenced him, he replied – much to everyone’s surprise – that his view of politics had been shaped by the Victorian jurist Henry Maine. Baldwin, who had been prime minister three times and had dominated British politics during the interwar years, was not known for having a strong interest in political philosophy. Yet he took from Maine, he said, a belief that guided him through his political life. From a system founded on hierarchy and command, governance was moving towards one based on agreement and consent; society was advancing from status to contract. At this point, Baldwin paused, seemingly deep in thought: “Or was it the other way round?”

A much subtler figure than he liked to appear, Baldwin was most likely pulling his audience’s leg. It is not easy to imagine David Cameron displaying any such self-deprecating wit. Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon begin and end Cameron at 10(William Collins), their recent account of the Prime Minister’s first five years in power, by asking whether he “has claim to be considered the 21st-century Baldwin”. But the differences between the two are more instructive than any similarities there may be.

Like Baldwin, who knew how to use the power of radio to craft an image of himself as a rather ordinary person who just happened to be prime minister, Cameron has lodged himself in voters’ minds as someone who, despite his privileged background, understands their everyday concerns. Yet there can be few who view him as having Baldwin’s reliably sound judgement. A prime minister who almost triggered the break-up of the United Kingdom with his slapdash management of the Scottish independence referendum and became the first head of a British government since 1782 to be defeated in the Commons on a matter of war (when he lost the vote to take military action in Syria in 2013) does not leave an impression of being a steady hand on the tiller.

While Baldwin’s bluff exterior concealed a sceptical intelligence, there is no reason to suppose that Cameron is anything other than he appears to be – impressively quick on the uptake but, in essence, unthinking. This may be why he has been such a successful practitioner of the Blairite politics of perception management. If there were anything hidden beneath Cameron’s changing appearances, the successive faces he has projected into the world could have looked inauthentic.

These shifts are in character. From urging greater understanding of young offenders in 2006 – a stance mocked as urging people to “hug a hoodie” – he shifted to bewailing “broken Britain” in the run-up to the 2010 general election. Having presented an image of himself as a green crusader, he appointed a climate-change sceptic, Owen Paterson, as environment secretary in 2012. Around the same time, according to Call Me Dave (Biteback), Michael Ashcroft’s and Isabel Oakeshott’s much-discussed unauthorised biography, Cameron protested, during an internal debate about whether British farmers should do more conservation work in return for EU subsidies: “Why should we be the only saint in the brothel?” Soon after the election in May this year, he began dismantling renewable energy subsidies.Such turns are the stuff of politics. But Cameron carries them off with exceptional ease and the reason for this is not that he is unusually skilful in duplicity. Instead, the figure that emerges from these two, quite different, but in some ways equally revealing books is of someone who does not need to dissemble because there is nothing beneath the surface. More than Tony Blair, whose ability to read the public mood was accompanied by a streak of messianic zeal that eventually destroyed him, Cameron is an archetypal embodiment of the hypermodern leader – prophetically anticipated by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) – who succeeds by going nowhere. Cameron is a devoted moderniser who sees himself as a force for progress. Yet he has no particular destination or direction in mind and moves on easily from accidents that have derailed others. The stench of Iraq will surround Blair for the rest of his days. In contrast, Cameron has left behind his ruinous adventure in Libya with barely a stain on him.


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