What to do when your party is widely despised, tainted by a toxic legacy of heartless spending cuts and vote-sapping sleaze? Simple: get a new PR boss. Better still, elect one as leader - which is precisely what the Conservatives have done in David Cameron. Now, five years after taking over at Tory Towers, the former director of communications at Carlton Television stands on the verge of power, having altered every aspect of his party's appearance, from the ethnic make-up of their parliamentary candidates to the Conservative logo itself. But, image aside, is the right-of-centre party really any different - can a conservative ever truly change? There can be no doubt that Cameron has dragged much of his party closer to the middle ground, on the surface at least. We are told to 'vote blue to go green', with xenophobia toned down and the environment talked up in its place; the 'blue rinse brigade' are gradually being phased out, with all-female and all-ethnic minority candidate lists redressing the previous imbalance in the ranks; and 'the Big Society' is in, in an implicit attempt to distance the party from Thatcher and win back votes among working class communities. Cameron has youth on his side, too - and, regardless of his politics, his energy and confident campaigning style have breathed new life into a party which was, frankly, closer to the Jurassic period than modern Britain before his arrival. It is an impressive feat, not least because his famously privileged background is far from a natural vote-winner in a country still obsessed with class. And yet the Tories are still not home and dry in the electoral race; and, despite the smooth Etonian's best efforts, the stale whiff of the past refuses to drift away.
The first scent of trouble came with the Ashcroft scandal, dangerously exposing the party's reliance on tax-dodging billionaires for campaign funds. The next dogshit in the roses was some ill-advised comments on homosexuality from senior Tory Chris Grayling, which led to a dramatic slump in the party's hard-fought share of the pink vote. The Tories also took some heavy hits in the furore over MP's expenses, with one of their fold claiming £1600 of taxpayers' money for a duck house on his estate, and another caught on camera suggesting that politicians were 'treated like shit' on £60,000 a year. Even the media savvy Cameron has been caught out, with a disastrous interview with Gay Times exposing the discomfort behind his liberal veneer. Suspicions rightly remain among the electorate that this is more of the same - and each new crack in the glass diminishes trust further. The Tories traditionally have a strong support base among the elderly and upper classes, and can expect a decent turnout on polling day. But, disappointingly for Cameron, this looks like all they are going to get - floating voters are queuing up to join Nick Clegg, and current opinion polls have the Tories hovering at a similar level to where they were in 2005. Cameron has failed to seal the deal with the electorate: he now has under a week in which to do it.
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A party leader who used to be in PR...that's a match made in political heaven and inked in blood by the devil. Americans love to drop the old saying: "you've got to be in it to win it!" From what I can tell, David Cameron is doing his best to prove that wrong. Clegg has got something to prove, Brown has got a lot to answer for, but Cameron? Cameron just has to keep shouting "Broken Britiain" while pointing at his opponents and hope that no one thinks too hard about how, exactly, one goes about being a "progressive conservative".And that's where being a PR guy comes in. Public Relations isn't about giving people what they want, its about convincing them that you can give them what they want. So you invent catchy terms that mean very little but are packed with positive connotation -- like "progressive conservative" which can either mean that you are everything to everyone or nothing to anyone due to the mathematical rule stating that one positive and one negative equal zero.
That term reminds me of another one that we heard about ten years ago in the US -- Compassionate Conservative. Although not exactly a contradiction in terms, the alarms bells should start jingling any time politicians feel the need to to preface their affiliations with an overtly positive adjective, because it usually means that even they don't believe they have been very nice in the past. These curious word associations rarely bring anything good either. There were enough Americans who actually believed in the concept of a "Compassionate Conservative" to elect one to be our President in 2000. Eight years, two wars, and one world economic recession later, most of us realized that we had been badly duped. Which isn't to say that, if the Tories are elected, David Cameron would "bush" his whole term(s). In fact, despite having read a fair bit about all three parties in the last week, I don't really have any idea WHAT Cameron would do if he were elected. Which might be exactly what he wants.
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