Gerald Warner: The road not taken: David Cameron makes the Tories unelectable

DAVE is toast. In less demotic terms, the Prime Minister and the Conservative party that was so craven as to submit to his leadership have exhausted the mandate of Heaven – as used to be said of collapsing Chinese dynasties. Because of that servile pusillanimity, aggravated by the insinuation of “modernising” placemen into pivotal positions in the party, Cameron may survive to lead the Tories to catastrophic defeat in 2015. Yet this month marks the point of no return: Dave is a Dead Man Walking.

The Conservative party is doomed too. Even the suggestions for replacing Cameron are counsels of despair: Boris the buffoon dangling on a zip-wire; Michael Gove – it becomes surreal. This week Cameron will formally abandon House of Lords reform. To retain a fig-leaf of ­reformist zeal he may adopt the private member’s Bill sponsored in the Upper House by that Scottish national treasure, President Lord Sir David Steel. This will be the most spectacular of the 20 or so 
U-turns he has so far performed. It will do nothing to save him or his party. There have been too many grandstanding distractions in place of the radical supply-side fiscal reforms and bonfire of regulations that the economy desperately needs to emerge from recession.

In revenge for being balked of their ­ermined quarry, Nick Clegg and his spoiled brats will torpedo reform of constituency boundaries. Clegg has suckered Cameron: the quid pro quo for boundary changes was not Lords reform but a referendum on AV, which the masses ungratefully rejected. Now there is talk of bribing the Lib Dems with increased spending on “green” energy. Is not democracy a precious and marvellous thing? An equitable distribution of parliamentary boundaries is petulantly blocked by people calling themselves Liberals and billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are thrown at wind turbines to placate the high priests of the carbon superstition.

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Watch for bigger and crasser mistakes by Dave as his reverses multiply. To compensate Lib Dems for missing the spectacle of their lordships mounting the tumbrils, the clever money is on Dave going all out for same-sex marriage, an aberration to which he recommitted himself last week. This is potentially terminal. A recent ComRes poll showed the Tories are on course to lose 1.1 million votes and 30 parliamentary seats on the issue of same-sex marriage alone. In Dave’s own constituency three out of four of those who said they would not vote for him again cited the marriage issue.

Constituency chairmen report a haemorrhage of membership over this policy. Last week the chairman of the party’s ­National Convention warned it would cost grass roots support at the next election. Cameron simply tells his critics they are out of touch – the classic bunker mentality. The alienation of Conservative supporters has resulted in a 45 per cent reduction in party income. The Electoral Commission’s accounts for 2011 show the Conservative party took in £23.7 million, spent £22.8m and had liabilities of £8.7m. Disillusioned donors have had enough. There is nothing on offer from this government that Clegg or Miliband would not have supplied.

Cameron, Osborne and their clique are remote from people, uninterested in anyone not important to them (“I hear what you’re saying… Excuse me, I must have a word with…). That hauteur betrays their intrinsically Whig, rather than Tory, ­mentality. Just as Ann Widdecombe’s “something of the night” destroyed Michael Howard, Nadine Dorries’ “arrogant posh boys” hit its mark in Cameron and ­Osborne. The Tory grandees’ routine ­dismissal of rank-and-file supporters (“They have nowhere else to go”) is ­obsolete in the age of UKIP.

Cameron will go down in history as the man who liquidated the most enduring political culture in Europe, the Tory party. He has made a speciality of snatching ­defeat from the jaws of victory, notably at the 2010 general election. Labour was ­exhausted, discredited and led by Gordon Brown: securing a landslide victory over the rabble that survived from Tony Blair’s once formidable war machine should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the acute and intuitively populist Conservative party. Except, of course, it was none of those things – not even Conservative.

The Tories lost their nerve. They believed their enemies’ propaganda. They forgot the basic lesson of political history that every prolonged term in office is succeeded by a similar period in opposition. The trick is to sit it out; to build up one’s resources; above all, to retain and assert one’s identity so as to be ready when the electorate tires of its new fancy and looks for a more solid prospect. Instead, the ­Tories allowed a bunch of “modernising” charlatans to hijack their party and there is now no road back to electability. Dave is the mediocrity who has killed Conservatism stone dead. «