David Cameron and Conservative renewal

The limits of modernisation?

Gillian Peele, John Francis

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Partis politiques

Offering a new overview of the Conservative modernisation project, this book assesses the efforts of David Cameron and his colleagues to rebuild the British Conservative Party in the period since 2005.

1

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal

Gillian Peele

Writing on the tenth anniversary of David Cameron’s victory in the Conservative leadership election, Paul Goodman, the editor of the influential online site ConservativeHome, noted that on some measures Cameron’s decade in the leadership made him the second most successful Conservative leader in the last hundred years (ConservativeHome, 6 December 2015). Yet, as Goodman’s article also underlined, there is a sense in which Cameron’s leadership remains puzzling and problematic: for many observers his fundamental beliefs remained unclear. There is thus a sense that he was either echoing the title of the ConservativeHome article, something of a political chameleon or a leader with a series of differing, indeed contradictory, impulses. Nor is there any agreed interpretation of the effect of his leadership. In some ways he has succeeded brilliantly against the odds in renewing the Conservative Party, taking it back to a dominant position in the British political system and delivering, as a powerful prime minister, a style of governance which has restored Conservative governing credibility. For critics, however, there remains the question of how securely based these achievements are and what the historical verdict on Cameron’s leadership will be. As the United Kingdom entered a phase of acute internal controversy over the impact of leaving the European Union, the legacy of his leadership for the longer-term future of the Conservative Party is far from certain.

This chapter explores the relationship between David Cameron’s leadership, including those contradictory impulses and tensions, and the revitalisation of the Conservative Party, the renewal that is the subject of this book. Academic interest in leadership, and especially in political leadership, has burgeoned in recent years (Rhodes and t’Hart, 2014). Leadership is a multidimensional concept involving the interaction of individuals and the context in which they operate. That interaction in turn raises a host of questions which will continue to challenge scholars in the field (for an excellent overview see Elgie, 2015). For the limited purposes of this chapter, three points from the leadership literature should be borne in mind at this stage. The first is the difficulty of providing a comprehensive and objective account of the personality, skills, traits and other factors which are displayed by an individual leader and determining how, if at all, they have shaped his or her actions. This difficulty is acute for the study both of historical figures and contemporary figures. In the case of living politicians, especially if they are still in office, the problem is compounded by the likelihood that perspectives on that leader may be subjective or self-interested, biased or partial and (inevitably) short-term and incomplete. Biographical studies which may provide an important source of understanding are likely to suffer from these limitations. Thus the available studies of David Cameron are useful but necessarily flawed in some respect. An early study of Cameron originally written in 2007 while containing many useful insights takes the analysis only up to 2012 (Elliott and Hanning 2007; 2^nd ed., 2012). Two excellent recent studies (which had at least some cooperation from officials) focus on Cameron’s role in government concentrating on the period of Coalition. Although largely positive about Cameron’s role, they are cautious in their judgments about how history will judge him and effectively take the story up until 2015. The study by Lord Ashcroft (a former Party treasurer and co-chairman) and journalist Isabel Oakeshott did not enjoy official cooperation and has to be read against the background of a less than happy relationship between Ashcroft and Cameron (Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015).

The second point from the recent leadership literature which we need to bear in mind is the importance of followers in the process of leadership (Kellerman, 2008). The interaction of leaders and followers is a subtle and evolving process: leaders attempt to influence the beliefs and actions of followers but followers through their expectations and attitudes influence the behaviour of and constrain leaders. Party leadership is additionally complex because there are multiple constituencies – different segments inside the Party and the external but crucial element of the electorate. In the effort to drive through any policy, conflicting responses from these different audiences may be expected and require different responses.

The final preliminary point about leadership is the difficulty of evaluating whether a given leader has been successful given that, as James and Buller note, the context of the exercise of leadership may differ radically over time (James and Buller, 2015). James and Buller, in a collection containing a series of insightful chapters on individual Conservative leaders (Clarke et al., 2015), provide an extremely useful set of comparative criteria for evaluating party leadership in a framework they call ‘statecraft’. These criteria – developing a winning electoral strategy, displaying governing competence, maintaining party management, securing political argument hegemony and bending the rules of the game – constitute an effective checklist for evaluating party leadership, and I return to them briefly at the end of the chapter.

Notwithstanding the complexities and difficulties surrounding the concept of leadership, the tasks of leadership in any organisation, including a political party, can be simplified to four: analysing and interpreting the situation in which the organisation finds itself; identifying an agenda for dealing with the situation, which covers both goals and mechanisms for implementing them; communicating that agenda in a compelling and attractive vision and narrative; and mobilising followers behind that agenda. As we shall see, the idea that the Conservative Party needed radical reconstruction – that it needed modernising – played an important role in Cameron’s performance of all four tasks but it was constrained, adapted and reconfigured in the light of the reception from followers inside the Party.

The role of leadership is clearly crucial to a project of party modernisation or reconstruction since the vision and strategy for effecting widespread change must be articulated and driven through from the top (Harmel and Janda, 1994; Bale, 2012). While there have been some examples of party leaders taking a detached view as significant party change was initiated (Winston Churchill in the immediate post-war period of Conservative reconstruction comes to mind), the leadership is usually the key driver in the process. While all large organisations including political parties necessarily involve a degree of collectivity in their decision-making and implementation processes, morale will be lowered if the top leadership does not actively buy into and give direction to its overall strategy. In a political party the leader’s own vision and values, agenda-setting powers and skill at party management as well as his or her energy and powers of communication are thus obviously key variables in determining the success of any effort to reconstruct the party and sell it to the electorate. Indeed in the increasingly personalised political system of the early twenty-first century, the political leader is the most important expression of what the party represents, the brand on offer to the voters.

Party leaders, however, face two directions – inwards to their party and outwards to the electorate. In the case of Cameron’s leadership, his own basic priorities and values sometimes seemed opaque to the elements of his Party; and, while there has been much success in terms of bringing the Party back to government and restoring its competitive position within the wider electoral system, the process has not been straightforward. Cameron’s leadership was at times been subject to intense internal opposition, some of it reflecting a difference over values and policy, some of it stemming from a sense that Cameron was not giving enough attention to Conservative Party opinion. Although speculation about ousting him was never sufficiently serious to threaten his position, it never entirely disappeared. To some extent Cameron attempted to quash much of this speculation by announcing that he would hand over the leadership before the next election in 2020. Nevertheless early 2016 saw public discussion about whether he could continue if he were to lose the European referendum and indeed Cameron realised that he had to resign in June 2016.

The relationship between Cameron’s leadership’s and party renewal is not a straightforward one. The different dimensions of the early modernisation agenda have shaped perceptions of Cameron’s leadership, both positively and negatively, despite the dilution of elements of that agenda after 2008. On the positive side it contributed to his achieving the leadership by making him seem the candidate most capable of grappling with the Conservative Party’s decline and producing an optimistic scenario for its future; it gave him a credible narrative and strategy for the early years of his tenure. Elements of it, especially the need to move towards a more socially representative set of standard-bearers and the shift towards a more liberal position on moral issues, steered the Party in a direction consonant with the movement of public opinion. On the negative side, it created – or reinforced – pockets of suspicion and opposition within the parliamentary party and the Conservative voluntary organisation and also in sections of the conservative media. When aspects of the modernisation project were sidelined, it generated scepticism about Cameron’s real political purpose and his underlying principles. Cameron’s leadership and the way he handled the process of renewal are thus interdependent and reinforcing features of Conservative politics and the debate about its character over the last decade.

Neither Cameron’s leadership nor the renewal agenda were static, however. As was noted in the Introduction, the modernisation project went through a number of different stages since the heady early days of Cameron’s leadership as the initial bold experiments and vision were deflected first by the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 and then by the formation of a coalition government dedicated to implementing an austerity programme to revive the economy. Within the Coalition government itself there were also important shifts as some key personnel, notably Steve Hilton, a key advocate of a radical modernisation agenda, and Andrew Cooper, found their influence waning, and others, notably the election strategist Lynton Crosby, acquired enhanced power in the run-up to the 2015 election. With the election of a Conservative government in 2015 there were hints of a search for a broadened and inclusive appeal based on ideals which echoed the ‘One Nation’ strand of conservatism and expressed newer thinking about aspiration and achievement in British society. On the other hand, the signs of innovative strategic rethinking in Conservative philosophy and rhetoric have been paralleled with significant elements of continuity with what might be seen as Thatcherite Conservative positions. Not surprisingly critics have over the whole period questioned the extent to which Cameron was genuinely committed to the vision he articulated in the immediate post-2005 years and whether he had or had not a distinctive philosophy which separates him from his immediate predecessors.

Just as the early modernisation agenda evolved into a broader process of renewal and consolidation, so Cameron’s leadership style and his handling of policymaking and party management also developed. Most obviously his authority within the Party expanded as he established his position and took the Party from the opposition to government first in Coalition and then in its own right. The enhanced authority brought by being prime minister was vitally important in securing his position within the Conservative Party; but the handling of the office has also been crucial in allowing the Conservative Party to reassert its governmental competence and in providing it with the electoral advantage of having a leader who has demonstrated prime ministerial qualities, one of the key factors shaping a party’s electoral strength. In the election of 2015 Cameron was consistently rated as the leader who would make the best prime minister and this seems to have been one of the deciding factors in the Party’s narrow 2015 victory (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2015).

Leadership and the contemporary Conservative Party

Scholars of leadership, however much they stress the importance of personality and political skills in understanding its exercise, necessarily also emphasise the context in which leadership operates. A variety of factors are relevant here: the specific culture and traditions of the Conservative Party, the wider environment of the political system as a whole and the kaleidoscopic set of political events which confront any political leader. Leaders of modern political parties, as we have noted, have to satisfy a number of different constituencies which may have markedly divergent values and preferences and different levels of attention. Even within a single political party there may be profound differences between what generates support or opposition within the parliamentary ranks and what plays well with the ordinary party members. And of course what appeals to party stalwarts and activists may not appeal to the voters as a whole, creating real conflict between the immediate pressures of party opinion and the need to respond to voters’ agendas. Thus, while Cameron, in an early effort to de-emphasise the highly divisive question of Europe, tried to shift the focus to issues that might be of more immediate importance to the broader electorate, the salience of Europe for his backbenchers made such a strategy difficult to implement. Similarly in the highly controversial struggle over the issue of same-sex marriage during the Coalition government of 2010–15, Cameron had to balance the intensely antagonistic views of sections of the Conservative Party membership and backbenchers with broader support for reform among the public at large.

Traditionally the Conservative Party has been seen as giving its leaders extensive authority, allowing them to set their own stamp on policy and to select key officials such as the Party Chairman. Even with the reformed organisational arrangements put in place by William Hague, the hierarchical structure of the Conservative Party remained marked, to the anger of some constituency activists and indeed to many backbenchers who wanted a more consultative and democratic ethos (Strafford, 2013). In fact, the position of Tory leaders, though powerful, has always been more vulnerable than a superficial reading of the situation might suggest. The Conservative Party in Parliament has been ruthless in its willingness to remove leaders who lose the capacity to deliver electoral success. Few Conservative leaders have enjoyed consistent consensual support and many have experienced debilitating bouts of intra-party opposition to their position.

The culture of a political party is not static and can change subtly as a result both of leadership cues, internal developments and changes in the wider society. Over the past two decades the Conservative leader has regularly confronted demands for greater responsiveness from the Party. Thus there have been a series of changes to the machinery of leadership selection (and equally importantly, deselection) which have occurred over the period since 1965 (Denham and O’Hara, 2008; Quinn, 2012). These changes to the rules have altered the ease with which challenges to a Tory leader may be mounted and, by introducing a role for the wider Party membership, they have altered the dynamics of leadership politics. However, as Denham and O’Hara emphasise, in many ways the crucial element of support remains that of the Conservative Party in Parliament and the crucial factor for maintaining legitimacy the prospect of winning a general election (Denham and O’Hara, 2008). Despite the victory under the rules, Cameron himself experienced periods when his leadership was anything but secure and it was not clear what, if anything, he had a mandate for as a result of his leadership campaign (Denham and O’Hara, 2007, 2008). Indeed, as will be argued later, one of the most intriguing features of his leadership was the continuing lack of warmth between himself and sections of his own party, especially the right. Although the various strands of the right, including the Cornerstone, No Turning Back and the 92 Group factions, originally endorsed him, they became persistent critics of his leadership.

More generally the Party has changed much of its ethos and culture, shedding a good deal of the deference and self-discipline which used to govern its internal proceedings. Faction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Introduction: the politics of Conservative renewal: Gillian Peele and John Francis
• 1 David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal: Gillian Peele
• 2 Constructing a new conservatism? Ideology and values: Richard Hayton
• 3 Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned: Peter Dorey
• 4 The Conservative Party and a changing electorate: Matthew Burbank and John Francis
• 5 The parliamentary party: Philip Cowley, Mark Stuart and Tiffany Trenner-Lyle
• 6 Continuing fault lines and new threats: European integration and the rise of UKIP: Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker
• 7 The evolving Conservative Party membership: Tim Bale and Paul Webb
• 8 Conclusion: a limited Conservative renewal?: Gillian Peele and John Francis
• Select bibliography
• Index