It was the face that launched a thousand spoofs. The picture of David Cameron that the Tories used in their first poster of the election campaign was too sleek, too shiny. It was easy to believe that it had been airbrushed — but a Conservative strategist insists that it wasn’t. “The truth is worse,” he says. “Dave does actually look like that. His cheeks really are that smooth.”
The narrowing in the Tory poll lead can, at least in part, be explained by the fact that Mr Cameron still too often gives the impression that he thinks he was “born to rule” rather than that he has to campaign to become Prime Minister with a clear idea of what he wants to do with the job.
It’s not just the well-scrubbed public schoolboy’s face, the slick, neatly brushed hair or the smart-enough- to-dress-down open-neck shirt. It’s not just the expenses claim for wisteria trimming or the organic veg patch or even the Eton and Bullingdon Club background.
The Notting Hill set that runs the Tory Party has managed to create a feeling that they are, as Sir Nicholas Winterton put it so memorably, a “different class of people”.
Lord Ashcroft, the party’s deputy chairman, announced yesterday that he is a non-dom and, therefore, does not pay tax in this country on his overseas income. That reinforces the sense that the Tory high command is a wealthy elite, more comfortable in the Caribbean than in Canning Town.
When Mr Cameron describes the Conservatives as the “party of the poor” it conjures up a picture of the local grandee handing out food parcels to hungry villagers. When the Tory leader hugs huskies it looks a bit like Prince Charles hugging trees, an environmentalism rooted in a desire to conserve. The “broken society” is something theoretical and remote from the white stuccoed villas of West London or the white beaches of Belize.
This isn’t class war. There is a cliquishness to the Cameron circle that conveys the sense that its members are detached from the rest of the country. They are godparents to each others’ children, they share school runs and swap dinner parties. Unlike those around Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, key members of the inner group are bound together by friendship first and politics second. There is an incestuousness to a set that had rows and reconciliations, romances and rejections, way before it ever thought of seeking power.
But, as they come to an election, voters want to know whether the Conservative leader would be an effective Prime Minister, not whether he is a loyal friend. It’s not enough for Mr Cameron to think that he would be good at the job, or to believe, in a rather patrician way, that it is his duty to serve his country. He has to convince a sceptical electorate that he has a sense of mission about the kind of Britain he wants and a sense of purpose about how he would create it.
He cannot simply ask if voters can bear “five more years of Gordon Brown”. There is no “patriotic duty” to get rid of the Labour Government. His “patriotic duty” is, if elected, to run the country as well as he can. This has to be a battle of ideas, fuelled by passion.
The Tories have been wobbling for weeks. There have been disagreements about how many policy details the party should reveal before the election and whether they should put themselves on the side of optimism or pessimism. Right-wingers have been pressuring Mr Cameron to go farther in promising spending cuts.
Last weekend’s spring conference was a watershed moment. In his speech, the leader made clear that he had no intention of blowing the Tory “dog whistle” and said that he still believes that “sunshine will win the day”. After weeks of confusion, he also announced that a marriage tax policy would be among plans revealed before the country votes — I am told the preferred option is a transferrable tax allowance for married parents of young children.
But one dispute remains unresolved: the balance between positive and negative campaigning in the run-up to polling day.
There is growing concern among some Shadow Cabinet ministers and strategists about the increasingly aggressive tone Mr Cameron uses against Mr Brown. It is, they believe, no coincidence that the poll gap has narrowed as the Tory leader launches a series of increasingly vitriolic personal attacks on the Prime Minister. Last week, for example, by turning the bully into the victim, Mr Cameron seems to have simply solidified support for Mr Brown. There was a similar backlash to the Conservatives’ misleading “death tax” poster campaign. Although ministers admit privately that “even I couldn’t bear another five years of Gordon”, the Labour leader is somehow gaining public respect for surviving all the backbiting and coups. The Tory leader’s attacks sound high-handed and arrogant, playing into the “born to rule” image and reminding voters of his party’s “nasty” past. “It’s perfectly legitimate to frame the election as a choice between Brown and Cameron and negative campaigning has a part in that,” says one frontbencher. “But David shouldn’t be doing it himself. We need a Norman Tebbit, an attack dog who can do it on his behalf.”
The narrowing of the polls could in the end help Mr Cameron. The big lead contributed to a sense that he was cruising effortlessly towards the top job, letting Lord Mandelson make Labour the underdogs.
Mr Cameron may have had a privileged upbringing, but after the death of his eldest child, Ivan, a year ago, nobody can say that he has had a charmed life. He has always done best when he is the plucky David pitching himself against Goliath — whether it was David Davis, the favourite to win the leadership, the Tory Taleban who tried to see off female candidates, or Mr Brown. As the election nears, Mr Cameron must be careful not to turn himself into the giant who crushes the opponents pelting him with slingshots.
If he continues to concentrate on a character assassination of the Prime Minister rather than on emphasising what he would do in No 10, he will turn off voters — particularly women. If he uses the sort of language in the TV debates that he has deployed in the Commons recently the electorate will be appalled. It would be a huge mistake for the youthful challenger to turn himself into the big clunking fist.
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Rachel Sylvester is a weekly columnist and political interviewer for The Times. Before that, she wrote about politics for The Daily Telegraph. She was also political editor of The Independent on Sunday.
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