David Cameron was on his way from London to Croydon in a second-class train car last October when a middle-aged man across the aisle interrupted him and started telling an obscene joke. Cameron, the 42-year-old leader of Britain’s Conservatives, had been discussing his first clear political memory — the May 1979 trial of the head of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, a closeted homosexual, for conspiring with a nightclub owner to murder his sometime lover, Norman Scott. That trial, which began the same week as the elections that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, remains a symbol, to a certain sort of Englishman, of the societywide breakdown of the 1970s, which was a decade of currency devaluations, crippling strikes, uncollected garbage and shortened workweeks. The eavesdropper across the aisle said with a smirk that he would vote for Cameron if Cameron could tell him how you fit four Liberals on a bar stool.
Cameron last month at Hammersmith Town Hall. A former tutor at Oxford called him a “moderate, liberal, sensible chap.” A conservative critic, however, says he is “self-serving” and “careerist.”
Uh-oh. Cameron is being asked to prove something. What is it? Does he need to show that, despite his efforts to make the Conservative Party more welcoming to modern Britons, he’s not too politically correct to enjoy a malicious laugh at gays’ expense? Does he need to prove, having gone to Eton and Oxford, that he can hold his own in proletarian repartee? Or does he just need to demonstrate that, even though his party hasn’t won a national election in almost two decades, he at least remembers the crises that gave it years in the sun as Britain’s majority?
“No, no, no, don’t go there,” Cameron says politely. “Don’t go there. This is a family train.”
But the guy has worked up a head of steam. “You remember it?” he asks.
“I know what the answer is, put it like that.”
That apparently does the trick. “Ah, well, you can get my vote then.”
“That’s one,” Cameron tells him. “Eleven million to go.”
Like President Obama, who benefits from being too young to have taken sides in the 1960s, Cameron has little firsthand knowledge of Britain’s battles of the 1970s, which set the country’s politics in stone for decades. Cameron was 7 when miners’ unions split the country with protests in 1974, presaging the even more divisive strikes that Thatcher broke a decade later. When people were telling Jeremy Thorpe jokes, he was 12. Generationally speaking, he and Obama were in the right place at the right time — they are the elder statesmen of the ever-growing part of the population for which the preoccupations of the baby boomers are not very relevant.
Conservatives — or Tories, as they are also called — are counting on Cameron to rescue them from the ideological confusion and public contempt that has been their lot since New Labour, behind Tony Blair, drove them from power in 1997, handing the party its worst drubbing since its founding in the 1830s. Tories have spent 12 years mulling over, and fighting over, a version of the problem that now confronts American Republicans. Cameron’s rise has led some conservative thinkers in the United States, notably the Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, to suggest that Republicans follow his lead. Speaking to Charlie Rose in April, Brooks described Cameronism as the “natural alternative” to the “technocratic” politics of Barack Obama and summed up Cameron’s philosophy this way: “You’re going to champion the technocrats in government; I’m going to champion every other institution in society, whether it’s family, career associations, the church — every other association you can think of.” A pragmatic kind of communitarianism runs through a lot of Cameron’s policies. His advisers, particularly the party’s shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, argue in defense of local institutions, from schools with competitive enrollments to small post offices, whose contributions to community cohesion don’t appear on the bottom line and are often invisible to orthodox Thatcherites.
Cameron’s advisers have concentrated on making conservatism more widely appealing and marketable. Cameron himself spends a lot of time making Internet videos. He installed an ecofriendly wind turbine on the roof of his house near Notting Hill in London. He introduced affirmative action to place more women onto Tory candidate lists. He went on a radio show called “Woman’s Hour” and talked about his boxer shorts.
Such glitz is something Gordon Brown, the country’s dour and deliberative Labour prime minister, has been neither willing nor able to match. Brown, who must call an election by next May at the latest, has dismissed Cameron as a “shallow salesman” on the floor of the House of Commons. Plenty of Tories harbor the same worry. But Britain — heavily dependent on banking, site of a wild real estate boom and saddled with mind-boggling levels of personal credit-card debt — has been hard hit by the financial crisis, for which voters blame Brown. Cameron’s lead hovers around 20 percent in most polls.
On top of the economic upheaval, British politics is sunk in scandal. In May, The Daily Telegraph began publishing leaked expense reports filed by members of Parliament. They showed an extraordinary variety of petty abuses, many involving regulations that allow legislators to deduct the expenses of a second home. The story began with observations about the stinginess of a Labour cabinet minister who deducted for a bathtub plug and a pornographic movie. But it soon became evident that many members of Parliament had lavishly equipped their homes at public expense. One deducted for moat maintenance for his estate; another tried to expense a “duck island.” Although most such abuses fell in the category of shocking but legal, dozens of members have either resigned their seats or announced they will not run in the next election. Not since the Profumo sex scandal of the early 1960s has the prestige of British politicians been lower.
Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of the forthcoming book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”
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