Cameron: The politics of modernisation and manipulation

By Timothy Heppell

David Cameron was leader of the Conservative Party (2005-16) and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2010-16). His legacy may be one of the most significant of any post-war British prime minister. But did he have a distinctive political strategy, and if so how should we characterise it?

This book provides a new and distinctive interpretation of ‘Cameronism’, focusing on the twin themes of modernisation and manipulation.

Heppell identifies three core aspects of Cameron’s modernisation strategy: his attempts to detoxify the image of the Conservative Party; his efforts to delegitimise the Labour Party by blaming it for the financial crisis and austerity; and Cameron’s use of the ‘Big Society’ narrative as a means of reducing the perceived responsibilities of the state. Manipulation is explored in relation to the Coalition Government and the exploitation of the Liberal Democrats, on policies such as austerity, tuition fees and electoral reform.

Finally, the book examines Cameronism in relation to current challenges to the existing political order: Brexit, Scottish independence, and the rise of populism.

This timely book is essential reading to those interested in British party politics and Prime Ministerial leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526116314

Book preview

Cameron

Series editor

Richard Hayton

The study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interest and importance, and is also of great significance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for a variety of reasons the study of conservatism and conservative politics was traditionally regarded as something of a poor relation in comparison to the intellectual interest in ‘the Left’. In the British context this changed with the emergence of Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party and its ideology, and a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. New Perspectives on the Right aims to build on this legacy by establishing a series identity for work in this field. It will publish the best and most innovative titles drawn from the fields of sociology, history, cultural studies and political science and hopes to stimulate debate and interest across disciplinary boundaries. New Perspectives is not limited in its historical coverage or geographical scope, but is united by its concern to critically interrogate and better understand the history, development, intellectual basis and impact of the Right. Nor is the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original research from a plurality of perspectives. Consequently, the series will act as a voice and forum for work by scholars engaging with the politics of the right in new and imaginative ways.

The right and the recession

Edward Ashbee

The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales

Alan Convery

David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation?

Edited by Gillian Peele and John Francis

Rethinking right-wing women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present

Edited by Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb

English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider still and wider

Ben Wellings

Cameron

The politics of modernisation and manipulation

Timothy Heppell

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Timothy Heppell 2020

The right of Timothy Heppell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 07190 9645 7 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

COVER IMAGE: David Cameron speaking at The London Conference on Afghanistan on 4 December 2014. © Patrick Tsui/FCO

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 The politics of detoxification: restyling and reconstructing Conservatism

3 The politics of delegitimisation: apportioning blame and establishing risk

4 The politics of depoliticisation: the Big Society narrative

5 Controlling the coalition agenda: limiting Liberal Democrat influence

6 Political binding: coalition unity and the exploitation of the Liberal Democrats

7 Managing political dimensions: the rise of multi-party politics

8 Conclusion

References

Index

Tables

1 Strands and strength of opinion within the PCP on social, sexual and moral issues, 1992–2016

2 The Big Society: aims, indicators and impact

3 Alternative options in terms of government formation in the aftermath of the General Election of May 2010

4 Right–left scores for individual sections in the Coalition Agreement

5 Government rebellion rates in the House of Commons, 1945 to 2015

6 Government defeats in the House of Commons, 1945 to 2016

7 EU referendum vote: strands and strength of opinion within the PCP, 2016

8 Strands and strength of opinion within the PCP vis-à-vis Europe, 1992 to 2016

9 EU referendum vote (2016) and party identification

10 Economic indicators, 2010–15

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Tony Mason and Robert Byron, as the commissioning editors for Politics at Manchester University Press, for their interest in this project and also for their patience. I should also acknowledge the support from the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, as they granted a sabbatical that enabled me to complete the research for this book. However, the most important thanks are owed to those whose day to day lives have been affected by the time taken to complete this book, most notably my sons Matthew (aged 14) and Oliver (aged 11) and my wife, Gayle. This is my sixth book in the last 12 years and in each I have always paid tribute to my parents, Irene and Neil, who have always shown an interest in my work, and it is appropriate that I do so again.

Abbreviations

1

Introduction

Enoch Powell once famously said that ‘all political lives end in failure, because that is the nature of politics’ (Powell, 1977: 151). Those words seem most apt when we consider the political career of David Cameron. For all his apparent success as a politician, he will be forever remembered as the Prime Minister who called a referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership, campaigned aggressively for Remain, and was rejected by the people, many of whom were Conservatives (see, for example, Ashcroft and Culwick, 2016; Bennett, 2016; Glencross, 2016; Oliver, 2016; Shipman, 2016; Clarke et al., 2017a; Worcester et al., 2017). This cataclysmic failure prompted his resignation as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, thus bringing to an end a political career that until that point had been characterised by repeated success.

Consider the following. First, he won the leadership of the Conservative Party when only 39 years old, and after only four years in Parliament (for academic appraisals of how and why Cameron was elected as leader of the Conservative Party, see Denham and Dorey, 2007 and Heppell and Hill, 2009). Second, he took over a discredited and directionless party, which had suffered three General Election defeats in a row, and led them back into power in May 2010, albeit in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (for the best appraisal of this period see Bale, 2010: 283–362). Third, he confounded expectations again by winning the General Election of May 2015 outright with a majority of 12, when every single opinion poll of the campaigning period suggested that it would be a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives and Labour running neck and neck (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 16, 162). The eventual gap between the Conservatives and Labour was nearly 100 seats (331 to 232), as the Conservatives increased their vote from May 2010 from 10,703,654 to 11,334,576 votes, with the gap between their vote and that of Labour being 1,987,272 votes (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 433).

However, viewing Cameron through the lens of success or failure, according to the terms outlined above, is limiting. Cameron was also a risk taker or a political gambler – for example, forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats was a calculated risk, as was holding a referendum on electoral reform – the Alternative Vote (AV) referendum of May 2011. The same argument has to apply to his willingness to acquiesce to the demands of the Scottish National Party (SNP) for a referendum on Scottish independence (September 2014) (Finkelstein, 2016). It was certainly not low risk for Cameron to choose to pursue legislation on same-sex marriage, or to legally enshrine that 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) should be spent on overseas development aid, given the hostility that was said to have existed towards both within his own parliamentary ranks (Seldon and Snowdon, 2015: 479–80). Cameron engaged in these as calculated risks that he thought would be either directly to the advantage of the Conservatives, or would indirectly create complexities for his political opponents. Cameron was thus a political manipulator – always trying to define or redefine the rules of the political game to aid himself, his faction of modernisers, or the Conservatives more broadly (Heppell, 2013a). In many ways, as this book will try to demonstrate, he was an adept political manipulator, but on the most contentious issue of his time – continued membership of the EU and linked to this the issue of immigration – Cameron miscalculated badly. As Finkelstein noted, it was on this issue that the gambler’s luck ran out (Finkelstein, 2016).

However, notions of Cameron as a political manipulator have not been that apparent when academics have attempted to analyse his leadership. If there is one word that political scientists have used to define his approach then it is modernisation (see, for example, Kerr and Hayton, 2015; Dommett, 2015; Peele and Francis, 2016). What drives this book is the idea that the debates about modernisation – what it is, and to what extent Cameron maintained his commitment to it – are valid, but they are limiting in terms of understanding the politics of Cameronism.¹ This is because modernisation, when used within the context of parties, is predominantly, but not exclusively, an opposition driven concept. It is mostly about analysing what parties do when they are in opposition, in order to address the obstacles to electoral recovery, more than it is about what they do once they regain power. Although parties that commit to modernisation may continue to emphasise it once in power, it has only limited value to us as students of British politics, when we are considering the Conservatives’ transition from opposition into coalition government. For all of the talk of governing in the national interest, the reality of coalition government between 2010 and 2015 was that the Conservatives wanted to exploit the Liberal Democrats and erode their support base. Thus modernisation is only part of the equation in terms of understanding Conservative Party politics post-2005. Once the Conservatives were part of a coalition government Cameronism was about the politics of manipulation. By understanding Cameronism through the analysis of these two central themes – the politics of modernisation and the politics of manipulation – this book makes a significant contribution to the academic debates about the Cameron era in British politics.

Studying Cameronism: the rationale for the book

What is the rationale for the book? The answer to this question comes from the condition of the Conservative Party when Cameron became their new leader. Between 1997 and 2005 the Conservative Party, the supposed natural party of government in twentieth-century British politics, had suffered three electoral reversals in a row. In doing so they had lost roughly one-third of the support that they had when John Major led them to victory in April 1992. Their vote share had collapsed from 41.9 per cent in 1992 to 30.7 per cent in May 1997, and then improved slightly to 31.8 per cent in June 2001 and another small increase was evident in their 32.4 per cent vote share in May 2005. In terms of actual votes cast the 14,092,891 supporters in April 1992 had contracted to successive returns of 9,602,957, 8,357,622 and 8,772,473 (with their returns in 2001 and 2005 reflecting a decrease in the turnout from 71 per cent in 1997 and then down to 59 and 61 per cent in 2001 and 2005) (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 432–3).

This decline reflected the enduring impact of the governing failure; party divisions and sleaze associated with the Major administration (see Dorey, 1999), alongside the success of New Labour as a party of government (see Driver and Martell, 1998, 2006; Hay, 1999; Heffernan, 2001; Ludlam and Smith, 2003; Hindmoor, 2005; Seldon, 2007a; Beech and Lee, 2008; Diamond and Kenny, 2011). The scale of the Conservatives’ problem was identified by Michael Ashcroft in his report on the 2005 General Election defeat. Entitled Smell the Coffee, Ashcroft’s report identified a series of assumptions that the electorate had towards the Conservatives, all of which were immensely worrying to whoever was elected as their new party leader. In addition to showing that Labour had a lead of 40 per cent in terms of governing competence, the research also asked voters to identify the three parties in terms of a series of descriptions. On this the Conservatives came first in terms of being ‘negative’, ‘aggressive’, ‘confused’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘depressing’, and they came last in terms of being ‘positive’, ‘moderate’, ‘clear’, ‘professional’ and ‘uplifting’ (Ashcroft, 2005: 79–97, 102; see also the following literature on the Conservatives in opposition 1997–2005, Garnett and Lynch, 2003; Bale, 2010; Snowdon, 2010; Dorey et al., 2011; Hayton, 2012).

Any doubts that the electorate did have about the governing capability of Labour was translating itself into increased support for the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrat vote share had increased from 16.8 per cent in 1997 to 22.0 per cent in 2005, and the number of votes cast for them had gone up from 5,242,947 in 1997 to 5,595,454 in 2005 (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 432–3). The gap between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats was now only 2,372,168, as opposed to the 8,493,623 gap between them in 1992. The Ashcroft findings showed that the Conservative Party had a severe image problem, and that they had made virtually no progress in terms of addressing this problem since losing power in 1997. Constructing a strategy that effectively critiqued the record of Labour in government, and stalled the rise of the Liberal Democrats, was the objective for Cameron when he became leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005 (Bale, 2010: 283–362).

Before we proceed it is important to emphasise the mountain facing Cameron in terms of initiating an electoral recovery (Curtice, 2009: 182; for a wider historical assessment of the Conservatives in opposition, see Ball and Seldon, 2005). This is best achieved by considering the impact of Leaders of the Opposition since 1951 (Heppell, 2012a). By impact we mean the following – the increase in seats secured at the next General Election under the new party leader, relative to the number of seats acquired at the last General Election, when the party in question is in opposition. Such an exercise demonstrates that to win power in 2010 Cameron needed a significant shift in public opinion. This was because he inherited a Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) made up of 198 members. This was 128 short of the number required to form a Conservative majority administration, and that would make a majority of just one. There is only one post-war example of an opposition leader making gains on such a large scale. The impact of Conservative opposition leaders in terms of seats gained is as follows: Winston Churchill 1945 to 1950 (+86) and then 1950 to 1951 (+22); Edward Heath 1965 to 1966 (-51), 1966 to 1970 (+77) and February to October 1974 (-20); Margaret Thatcher 1975 to 1979 (+62); William Hague 1997 to 2001 (+1) and Michael Howard 2003 to 2005 (+32). The impact of Labour opposition leaders in terms of seats gained is as follows: Clement Attlee 1951 to 1955 (-18); Hugh Gaitskell 1955 to 1959 (-19); Harold Wilson 1963 to 1964 (+59) and 1970 to 1974 (+14); Michael Foot 1980 to 1983 (-60); Neil Kinnock 1983 to 1987 (+20) and 1987 to 1992 (+42); Tony Blair 1994 to 1997 (+147); Ed Miliband (-26) and Jeremy Corbyn (+30) (data updated from Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 432–3; Denver, 2018: 16; see also Heppell et al., 2015).

Of those who had failed to lead their party from opposition and back into power – i.e. Churchill in 1950; Attlee in 1955; Gaitskell in 1959; Heath in 1966 and October 1974; Foot in 1983; Kinnock in 1987 and 1992; Hague in 2001; Howard in 2005; Miliband in 2015 and Corbyn in 2017, only Hague and Howard started from a weaker parliamentary base than Cameron. The best comparison in terms of parliamentary arithmetic would be the situation that Kinnock inherited in 1983. He had a parliamentary base of 209 members and it took the Labour Party, first under Kinnock (1983–92) and then John Smith (1992–94) and Blair (1994–97), 14 years and three parliamentary terms to return to power (Thorpe, 2008: 230–56). Cameron, in comparison, achieved the same ends – regaining power, albeit only in coalition – in five years as opposed to 14, making gains of over 100 seats; increasing the number of votes cast by 1,954,082; and securing a 3.7 per cent increase in their vote share. Given the toxicity of the brand that he inherited in 2005 this was an achievement that Conservatives, and non-Conservatives, need to acknowledge (Bale, 2012a: 236).

When we factor in the 2015 General Election result as well then the scale of the Cameron effect is more evident. During his leadership tenure the Conservative vote increased significantly. They added 2,549,661 votes between the General Elections of 2005 and 2015, they increased their representation from 198 to 331 seats, and they added 4.5 per cent to their vote share. In comparison the Labour vote share declined by 5.1 per cent over the same ten-year period and they lost the equivalent of 123 seats. The Cameron era also coincided with the collapse of the Liberal Democrats. Their vote share would shrink from 22.0 per cent to 7.9 per cent (down 14.1 per cent); their parliamentary representation fell from 62 to eight; and their vote base went from 5,985,454 to 2,415,661 (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 432–3).

When examining the Cameron effect two other considerations need to be emphasised. The Cameron era may have run parallel to the erosion of support for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but it also coincided with, first, the rise of the SNP and, second, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). The SNP secured a significant increase in terms of support with their 412,267 votes and six seats in 2005 transformed into 56 seats and 1,454,436 seats in 2015, with their gains being at the expense of Labour (Mitchell, 2015: 89). Meanwhile, although the rise of UKIP was not as evident in terms of parliamentary seats gained, it was in terms of votes – as they went from 603,298 in 2005 to 3,881,129 in 2015 (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015: chapter 12). Their representative success was more evident in terms of the European elections. Their second-place finish in the 2009 elections, on a 16.5 per cent vote share (2.5 million votes) and 13 MEPs, was transformed by 2014 into a 27.5 per cent vote share (4.3 million votes) and 24 MEPs. This placed them first ahead of Labour on 20 seats and 25.4 per cent with the Conservatives languishing third on 19 seats and 23.9 per cent (Curtice, 2014: 78–80).

That volatility, and the rise of multi-party politics, would run parallel to wider political and economic turbulence. Whilst the Conservatives were in opposition the third term Labour administration, by now under the prime ministerial leadership of Gordon Brown, were rocked by the dual crises of the banking collapse and the subsequent recession, and then the parliamentary expenses scandal.² If the degeneration of Labour and the fall of the Brown administration was dramatic, then events in the 2010 to 2015 Parliament produced a series of unexpected outcomes and potentially critical turning points, as the ‘rules of the game’ were openly questioned. The formation of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government led to a series of constitutional debates opening up. In the early part of the coalition era the electorate rejected an opportunity to change from first past the post (FPTP) to AV (see Whiteley et al., 2012; Curtice, 2013; Seawright, 2013a). In the latter part of the coalition era the Scottish electorate (narrowly) rejected independence (see Curtice et al., 2015), although the consequence was the opening up of the English question (Hayton, 2015; Hazell and Sandford, 2015; see also Kenny, 2016). Alongside sticking to the status quo in terms of the voting system and Scottish independence, other elements relating to the ‘rules of the game’ that were high on the agenda included House of Lords reform and constituency equalisation (Dorey and Garnett, 2016: 179–211). The threat to the Conservatives on their right from UKIP, led Cameron into committing a future Conservative administration to renegotiating the terms of EU membership, and then putting that new settlement to a referendum before the end of 2017. These debates on the ‘rules of the game’ – some of which may seem remote to the concerns of everyday voters, but consumed the political class – would take place against a backdrop of deficit reduction. The Cameron–Clegg coalition government committed themselves to an austerity programme to rebalance the economy. The route map out of recession was slow and painful, and did not result in rising living standards for all (see Whiteley et al., 2013).

The above analysis demonstrates that Cameron was a politician of considerable historical significance. Under his guidance, and despite the turbulence within British politics during his leadership tenure, the Conservative Party was in a far a stronger position in 2016 electorally – irrespective of Brexit – than when he inherited the leadership. Had it been suggested to a Conservative parliamentarian, activist or member in 2005, that on the tenth anniversary of Cameron becoming party leader, they would be a majority administration facing a Labour Party on 232 seats, led by a hard left rebel like Corbyn, and that the Liberal Democrat threat had been neutralised to such an extent that they only had eight seats, they would have found that hard to believe.

Studying Cameronism: justifying a thematic approach

Beyond establishing the rationale for the book, the other question that needs a brief explanation is the approach of the book. Here the central driver is to provide something distinctive from the existing literature on the Cameron era. From the non-academic literature there have been a couple of insightful biographies of Cameron – see, for example, Elliott and Hanning (2012) and Ashcroft and Oakeshott (2015). Journalistic accounts charting his impact as the new leader of the Conservative Party leader have been offered by Nadler (2007) (broadly sympathetic) and Hitchens (2010) (less so), and, of course, the publication of his conversations with Dylan Jones (2008) provided a clear insight into his motivations and convictions prior to becoming Prime Minister. Evaluations of his contribution to the evolution of the Conservative Party in opposition have been provided by the chronologically driven work of Bale (2010, 2016); Snowdon (2010); and Dorey et al. (2011); and similar territory is expertly covered from a thematic perspective by Hayton (2012). More policy orientated assessments of the Cameron era, both from an opposition and a coalition perspective, include Lee and Beech (2009, 2011), Beech and Lee (2015), Bochel (2011), Heppell and Seawright (2012), Seldon and Finn (2015) and Peele and Francis (2016). Hazell and Yong (2012), Dorey and Garnett (2016) and Atkins (2018) offer thematic assessments on the performance of the coalition. These academic offerings can be viewed alongside coalition appraisals emanating from broadly sympathetic allies in the shape of Matthew d’Ancona (former editor of the Spectator); and implacable critics such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker (Toynbee and Walker, 2012, 2015; d’Ancona, 2014). By far the most detailed and impressive assessment of Cameron as Prime Minister – i.e. from a governmental rather than a party leadership perspective – is the (broadly) chronologically structured work of Seldon and Snowdon (2015).

This book avoids the chronological approaches identified above, and it also eschews the detailed policy based assessments. It does so not because such approaches are flawed but because they have already been provided. Instead this book adopts an approach that is built around the two themes identified in the opening paragraphs of the introduction – first, the oft-mentioned theme of modernisation; and, second, the hardly referred to theme of manipulation. The first part of the book considers the theme of modernisation and in doing so it concentrates on addressing the following:

Detoxification is the focus of chapter 2 of the book. It focuses on the extent to which change within the Conservative Party occurred under Cameron. The use of the term detoxification reflects the perception that the Conservative brand was tainted, and that electoral recovery was dependent on distancing themselves from the negatives that had disfigured them in the post-Thatcherite era. The chapter argues that change did occur, but that there were limits in terms of the scale of change that Cameron could impose upon his party. To illustrate this, the chapter will explore the following themes associated with modernised Conservatism – i.e. environmentalism, feminisation, international aid and same-sex marriage – to showcase how their commitment to these themes, once in government, was patchy and inconsistent. The chapter will also consider the extent to which, numerically, the PCP was moving in a socially liberal direction in terms of attitudes towards social, sexual and moral issues.

Delegitimisation is the focus of chapter 3 of the book. It will consider how Conservative strategy towards undermining Labour evolved during the Cameron era. It will identify how fluid the Conservative strategy was, and how dependent upon circumstances it became. The chapter will demonstrate how the Conservatives initially set about nullifying the ‘investment under Labour or cuts under the Conservatives’ narrative, which was so successful for New Labour in the age of prosperity pre-2008. It will also identify how, in the aftermath of the financial crash, Cameron abandoned this strategy of converging on Labour to neutralise the economy. Thus, chapter 3 will explore how the Conservatives set about establishing their narrative of the financial crash – i.e. it was the fault of a profligate Labour government. Apportioning blame was thus central to electoral strategy in 2010, and