ANALYSIS:CONSERVATIVE MPs heading to Manchester this week were given speaking notes by Conservative Central Office, suggesting, among other things, that they should talk about fashion if they were stuck for a topic.
The one subject they were not to talk about was the European Union.
Despite the Conservatives’ belief that they were right all along about the euro, prime minister David Cameron and those around him are petrified that the party will slip back into old habits, “banging on endlessly”, as one MP put it, about subjects that do not engage British voters.
Instead, the leadership was determined to focus on narrow points of conflict with the EU – human rights law, for one – rather than on the UK’s place in the union itself, and certainly not on the desire by the majority of grassroots Tories for an “in/out” referendum.
Before a packed fringe meeting yesterday, Conservative MP Nick Boles told delegates that every policy must pass “the relevance test”: does it engage voters, and does it ease the lives of those described by Labour leader Ed Miliband as “the squeezed middle”?
The danger for the Conservatives, he argued, is that they are seen as the party for the rich, or, thanks to the Herculean, if patrician, efforts of former party leader Iain Duncan-Smith, too focused on the British underclass – forgetting to direct their message to the middle ground.
European Union membership fails that relevance test, he argued, while the Conservatives’ obsession with getting rid of the 50p tax rate introduced by Alastair Darling in his final year fails to address the concerns of those who “obey the law, work hard and read books at night to their kids”.
Today, Cameron will address 4,000 delegates in Manchester – the only occasion during the week when the hall will be full, with many in the audience still unconvinced by the modernisation strategy that he has led since his election in 2005.
His biggest sin, in their eyes, is that he failed to deliver a majority Conservative government, as they sit uncomfortably in alliance with the Liberal Democrats – convinced that the junior coalition partners are influencing matters above their weight.
For them, Cameron’s changes, which forced the party to put away, or at least to tone down, some of their most cherished beliefs, delivered just a 4 per cent rise in support in May 2010 despite having faced “one of the most discredited governments of recent times”, as one put it yesterday.
Cameron is, said influential Conservative writer Tim Montgomerie, a Conservative in all things: on taxation and the economy, on how a society should be run, and patriotic to a fault, but he expresses his views moderately, rather than with the zealousness desired by his ranks.
“Perhaps people want more passion, but it isn’t in his nature. I am more of a Thatcher’s child myself,” Montgomerie told the Freedom Association, with more than a hint of disappointment in his voice. It is a disappointment shared by many in the Conservatives’ rank and file.
Part of the Conservatives’ problem, however, is that they have rewritten their own past.
For them Margaret Thatcher was an ideological titan who never failed to carry the torch, rather than a leader who was prepared to be pragmatic when the occasion demanded it.
Despite the gripes of some of his own, Cameron has reason to be pleased: his leadership is secure, his actions in Libya have been, for now, vindicated, if of little interest to his supporters, while he faces in Labour’s Ed Miliband a leader who has yet to establish ties to voters.
There are, however, dangers by the score, not least the economy and the National Health Service, often the one unifying institution in the UK.
Reforms of the NHS, driven by the Conservatives, are potentially toxic if seen by voters as reducing services.
But the economy is central to all of the Conservatives’ aspirations.
The developing international crisis has meant that chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne’s ambition to cut spending now, followed by tax cuts before the next election, is an unrealisable dream.
Instead, the best Cameron and Osborne can hope for is that the “sunlit uplands” once spoken about by Winston Churchill are visible to British voters, if only in the near-distance, when they next go to the polls.
Judging by the chosen motto for the Manchester gathering, “Leadership for a Better Future”, Cameron and Osborne believe they still have the best of the argument over Labour on the economy.
Despite the pain caused by cuts and the threat of winter public sector strikes, both are convinced that the majority of voters accept that austerity is needed and that Labour has yet to regain credibility on the issue that was so central to its success in 1997 under Tony Blair.
Declaring that “together, we will ride out this storm”, Osborne attempted to strike a Churchillian tone in his speech on Monday – even if it failed in terms of the standard of rhetoric – insisting that the choices made have delivered stability .
“We should never take our eyes off the prize: a British economy freed from its debts; growing strongly, spreading prosperity to all of our people, so that we can fulfil that solemn promised to the next generation.”
It is a promise that may not be deliverable at any time. Certainly, it is not deliverable by 2015.
Cameron will take the applause today with aplomb, but he knows that he must convince his own that next time he can take his people to the Promised Land of majority rule.
Mark Hennessy is Irish TimesLondon Editor