Matthew d'Ancona: Blue is the colour now but the battle is far from won

New polls hint at a surge of support for the Tories. The PM should not get too excited or Labour too downcast

I’m your man: David Cameron’s personal ratings are being met by a new confidence in the Tory party (Picture: Reuters)

14 May 2014

In his long diary entry for November 22, 1990, Alan Clark describes an encounter with Bob Worcester, the founder of MORI, on the evening of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. Meeting Clark on College Green, Worcester shows him a poll in which respondents are asked how they would vote if particular individuals were leading the Conservative Party.

“To my amazement,” records the diarist, “I saw that John Major had drawn level [with Michael Heseltine]!” Clark then writes that he is going to his constituency in Plymouth to sound out opinion. “But even if I can’t get a single person in the town to tell me to vote for John Major, that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is an instructive episode that does much to explain why the Conservatives’ new lead in two opinion polls — Guardian/ICM and Lord Ashcroft’s survey — has caused such excitement. Polls are a snapshot of opinion. But they are also a driver of behaviour. In politics, success — or, more accurately, perceived success — tends to metastasise. A poll lead not only breeds confidence within a political party, it encourages other voters to cluster around the prospective victor: Darwin would have understood the pitiless science of psephology.

This sudden surge is important for two reasons. The Tories have not led the pack since March 2012, the year of the “Omnishambles”: in campaigning politics, that is an eternity. Second, the Conservatives’ new poll lead suggests an all-important convergence between David Cameron’s resilient personal ratings and the electorate’s perception of its economic wellbeing.

It is as well to be cautious in advancing such a transformative thesis: but it looks as though this will not be a “voteless recovery” of the sort that did Major no good in the 1997 election. The statistical upturn is starting to translate into better household finances and — at last — political credit to the main governing party.

All this means the Tories are in the battle rather than that they have won it. But it will certainly rattle those on the Labour side who believe a “35 per cent strategy” — a focused appeal to a strictly limited but correctly targeted group of voters — is safe to pursue.

David Axelrod, the party’s new campaign consultant — who helped Barack Obama win two presidential elections — believes the great political theme of the post-Crash era is the fair distribution of prosperity. It is not enough to preside over growth, which must be visibly spread in a just and equitable fashion. Axelrod, who is in the UK this week, has faith that Ed Miliband grasps this better than his opponent and that Labour can still prevail next year if it speaks with clarity and passion. His record as Obama’s guru should command respect: he did not come here to cheer up an ailing centre-Left party. He came to win.

For his part, Miliband has long predicted a dip in his fortunes: the question is how he copes with this new adversity. He is also within his rights to describe the contours of political opinion as “unpredictable”. Whatever happens in the European and local elections a week tomorrow, the main event in May 2015 will be fought according to new rules. It will be the first General Election to follow a period of coalition government since 1945. The Lib-Dems will be fighting to avoid extinction. The impact of Ukip is unknowable. National swings will mean much less than the voting patterns of small numbers of people in marginal seats.

William Hague likes to joke that the Conservative Party has only two modes: panic and complacency. There has been plenty of the former in the past two years, particularly among Tory traditionalists who have hated Cameron’s support for same-sex marriage and green measures and fear the rise of Ukip portends an organic split on the Right.

There is likely to be another outburst of panic on May 25 when the results of the European elections are announced. If, as expected, Ukip does well, beating the Tories and perhaps winning the contest outright, there will be fresh pressure upon the Prime Minister to chase Nigel Farage’s party by lurching to the Right. The recent electoral history of the Conservative Party should be sufficient warning against such a foolish course.

Instead, Cameron should spend the minor windfall of political capital bequeathed by these new polls to remind his party of the virtues of patience. In private, George Osborne has always believed that, at some point, the statistical recovery would begin to impinge upon the daily lives of voters and that this would eat into Miliband’s poll lead.

The consistent essence of the Coalition’s fiscal and political strategy has been that the electoral rewards for tough measures taken early on would not arrive quickly — but that they would, eventually, be forthcoming. For the first time, there is polling data to vindicate (provisionally, at least) that assertion. Two years ago, there was no shortage of Tory MPs calling for the Chancellor’s head. Now, he is fêted by the same backbenchers for his tenacity. Such is the two-faced etiquette of politics.

Boris Johnson has been telling friends that he does not expect the Conservative leadership to be an issue next year. Which is to say that the Mayor — no slouch when it comes to reading the political tea-leaves — believes Cameron is likely to win next year. That outcome is all the more likely if the PM keeps his present run of luck in perspective: stocks can go down as well as up, and they almost certainly will again.

The modern electorate is fickle, capricious and vindictive. It is steeling itself to give Cameron a second term but will not make it easy. Hague is right to warn against complacency as well as panic: the slightest whiff of presumption on the Tory side will be punished brutally by the voters on election day. They know the truth of the old cliché: there is only one poll that really counts.

Matthew d'Ancona: Blue is the colour now but the battle is far from won

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