David Cameron may have to revise his big plan

Oct 8 2008 Agenda

At the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Tory leader David Cameron said he was a man with a plan. Can he live up to his billing, asks Chris Game.

Some political slogans you just know, the first time you hear them, are destined to backfire. One classic was ‘In your heart, you know he’s right’ – the intendedly self-promoting slogan of the ultra-conservative Republican, Senator Barry Goldwater, in his doomed 1964 presidential campaign against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson.

Far from persuading voters that Goldwater’s extreme anti-Soviet, anti-social welfare views were not actually that different from those of most ordinary Americans, it proved a gift to the Johnson campaign and stand-up comedians alike. Among the printable retorts were: ‘In your guts, you know he’s nuts’, and ‘In your heart, you know he might’, as in press the nuclear button, start World War III, or whatever.

In today’s blogosphere, political slogans are even more vulnerable, and my guess is that David Cameron has already had second thoughts about his assertion at the conclusion of his party conference speech at the ICC that “I’m a man with a plan”.

It was risky anyway. First, it almost invited instant comparison with one of Baldrick’s cunning offerings. Secondly and more importantly, the whole speech seemed to emphasise that he (Cameron, not Baldrick) didn’t have a plan, or at least one that he was prepared to share with us, either to deal with the global financial crisis or as a future Prime Minister.

Moreover, as Andrew Cowen noted in his column, the slogan is hardly original, and its pedigree is patchy at best.

Andrew’s example of a man with an earlier plan – Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of the Colombian capital of Bogata – is definitely at the positive end of the spectrum. His plan is that cities in developing countries like Colombia should end all investment in roads and automobile infrastructure and switch the money instead to public transport, pedestrian and cycle promenades, schools, museums and public parks.

Green as some of Cameron’s political aspirations are, I somehow can’t see him putting that lot at the centre of a Conservative manifesto. Other precedents, however, are worse than merely irrelevant.

Jamaica’s last election under colonial rule, in 1962, was contested and by rights should have been won by the then Prime Minister, Norman Manley. Founder of the People’s National Party, Manley campaigned as ‘The Man with the Plan’ for Jamaica’s independence.

He was defeated, though, by his own cousin and rival Labour Party leader, Alexander Bustamente, who effectively, if unfraternally, mocked him as ‘The Clot with the Plot’.

Manley - and perhaps Cameron’s researchers - should have known better, for only three years previously, in our own 1959 General Election, Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been an equally unsuccessful ‘man with a plan’.

This one promised to increase industrial production and make Britain a more prosperous, more equal and fairer society. Voters, however, were more impressed by Harold Macmillan’s reminder that they had ‘never had it so good’: ‘Life’s Better Under the Conservatives – Don’t Let Labour Ruin It’. They didn’t.

History, then, hasn’t generally been kind to politicians with plans, but who cares apart from saddos like me? It’s yoof culture that matters, and especially music, yet here again Team Cameron have made some odd decisions.

The Leader left the Symphony Hall stage to a thumping rendition of Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together, which sounds appropriate for a party wanting desperately to be heard, as Cameron himself put it, singing the same tune. But just glance at the lyrics.

The song’s about the husband in a collapsing marriage pleading with his wife to stick together purely for the sake of their child, which is hardly the best advertisement for the institution to which Conservatives attach such value.

Again, though, it’s the ‘man with a plan’ which provides the greatest embarrassment. By far the best-known version of the words comes in the opening lines of Stevie Wonder’s 1973 song, He’s Misstra Know-it-All – as particularly the younger section of the conference audience seemed to recognise immediately, possibly because it’s now downloadable as a mobile ringtone.

He’s a man, With a plan, Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand, He’s Misstra Know-it-All. Misstra Know-it-All.

It’s not the most affectionate byname for a party leader, but, incredibly, almost every other line of the song is worse - worse even than the scansion and rhyming.

Makes a deal, With a smile, Knowin’ all the time that his lie’s a mile.

Must be seen, There’s no doubt, He’s the coolest one with the biggest mouth.

If he shakes, On a bet, He’s the kind of dude that won’t pay his debt.

And there are 15 more verses in the same vein. As Victor Meldrew might declaim: unbelieeeevable!

Is there any serious point behind this knockabout stuff, I hear you ask. As it happens, there is. The greater threat to David Cameron from this ‘man with a plan’ episode comes from neither historical allusions nor song lyrics, but from the widespread public perception, already noted, that he doesn’t so far appear to have any plan worth speaking of, and from the fact that someone else does.

As at all party conferences, there was no shortage of policy papers and proposals circulating around the ICC during the four days the Conservatives were in residence. Few, however, were sufficiently polished to take the form of a 200-page published book, and only one such book happened, felicitously, to be entitled The Plan.

There is, in short, already a Conservative man with a plan – or two men, to be precise – and neither is David Cameron. He risks being outflanked, quite literally, from the fringe of his own party.

The authors of The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain are Douglas Carswell, MP for the Essex constituency of Harwich and Clacton, and Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parliament for South East England.

Localism of any kind has not been a prominent value of Conservatism in recent years, but Direct Democracy is an organised and articulate group. Its ideas may come mainly from the party’s libertarian wing, but its members are much too well placed to be dismissed as loony right.

The movement produced its first book in 2005, under the appropriate title Direct Democracy. It was endorsed, opportunistically perhaps, by three of the four candidates then contesting the party’s leadership, including Cameron, and some of its ideas are already part of Conservative mainstream thinking and practice.

Candidate selection by open primary elections actually pre-dates Direct Democracy, but under Cameron it has become much more frequent, giving a huge boost to Boris Johnson’s candidacy for London Mayor, when he took over three-quarters of a primary vote open to all Londoners.

More controversially, directly elected police chiefs have become party policy, and they reappear in The Plan as locally elected sheriffs, who would also assume responsibility for prison places, probation and community service orders, and set local sentencing guidelines. It is one of several policies reflecting what the authors like to call the Jeffersonian or anti-federalist strand of American government.

Other sections of The Plan propose scrapping almost all MPs’ allowances, abolishing the Human Rights Act, appointing senior judges through open parliamentary committee hearings, allowing patients to opt out of the NHS and parents out of their local state schools, and replacing EU membership with a free trade accord

* Chris Game is lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham. A selection of Chris’ Post columns is available at: www.inlogov.bham.ac.uk/staff/Game.shtml.