The Conservative leader is the subject of murmurings after successive strategic mistakes – might a woman be next?
How many strategic errors does the Conservative party have to make before even a Labour party led by the likes of Ed Miliband seems electable to the British people? I ask because the current Tory leadership seems to be playing the electoral equivalent of Go for Broke, the board game where you race to lose a million pounds and the winner is the one who becomes penniless first.
Two-thirds of the British people agree with Conservative instincts on crime, tax, Europe, immigration and welfare, but David Cameron decided that the Tory problem was that the party was too rightwing. In reality the problem was that the party was seen as lacking sufficient heart for families struggling to make ends meet. Cameron pursued the wrong kind of modernisation and we ended up as a party of white-collar liberalism rather than blue-collar conservatism.
Error has been piled upon error in subsequent years. We fought an election campaign in which even our advertising agency couldn't work out what our message was. The voters didn't stand a chance. We chose a big idea, the "big society", that is as intellectually interesting as it is useless on the doorstep. It's so far removed from working families' current concerns that polls find, over time, that it is understood less rather than more.
Then there are the two big calls since the election. Where Margaret Thatcher followed a ruthlessly effective strategy of divide and rule – dividing the British left and keeping the right united – the compromises of coalition government have united all British leftwingers in the Labour camp but divided the right and created a surge in support for Ukip.
Rather than using the economic crisis as a grand opportunity for a far-reaching overhaul of the supply side of Britain's economy, the prime minister, chancellor and docile Liberal Democrats became overly obsessed with the deficit. Unfortunately this obsession did not lead to urgency. Instead of getting on with the task, the biggest reduction in public spending will occur in 2014-15 – general election year. Debts, meanwhile, are mounting and a staggering 90% of cuts still have to be implemented.
The Conservative party is a ruthless beast, and at other times there might have been serious speculation about the party needing a different leader with a superior strategy. Although leadership murmurings are indeed starting, they are far from serious. Despite the chaos inside the Downing Street operation, the vast majority of Conservative MPs still see Cameron as an asset. He's telegenic. Intelligent. Cool under fire. Magisterial in the House of Commons.
Cameron's greatest single advantage, however, is the absence of any obvious alternative to his leadership. A new ConservativeHome poll of more than 100 influential centre-right journalists, thinktank chiefs and parliamentarians couldn't find any agreement on a near-term successor. Six names, each receiving a similar proportion of votes, were mentioned if a change became, in theory, essential before the next election. William Hague and Boris Johnson lead the pack. Hague – who is proving to be a natural foreign secretary – means it when he says he really doesn't want the job. Few believe Johnson when he says he doesn't want the Tory crown, but few yet see him as a credible candidate. If he beats Ken Livingstone, if he can get back into the Commons, and if MPs see him perform in parliament, that might change, but not any time soon.
David Davis is mentioned but he fluffed his last opportunity and is seen more as a conscience of the right rather than its future. George Osborne is the favourite of the Cameron circle but his stock has fallen heavily after the mishandled budget. Michael Gove scores well but wouldn't ever stand against Osborne. Jeremy Hunt could yet emerge but is an ideological unknown.
The panel of influentials is clearer about the next Tory leader when asked about the period beyond the next election. They nearly all choose an MP from the 2010 parliamentary intake. Some of the men, including Matthew Hancock, Sajid Javid, Rory Stewart and Dominic Raab, get a handful of mentions, but a much larger proportion of the votes go to women, and four in particular – Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel, Anna Soubry and Elizabeth Truss. It's as if the party is yearning for another Thatcher. All four are fighters. Each has strong beliefs. They perform well in the media. In different ways they all challenge the perception of what it means to be a Conservative. Three of the four – not Soubry – are on the right of the party.
It is, of course, far too early to make credible predictions about who may become Tory leader at an unknown point in the future. Few of the names I've mentioned have been tested in the political furnace. What is clear, however, even at this early stage, is that one of Cameron's most significant legacies will be the generation that became MPs under his leadership. They are high quality. They are gritty campaigners. And the brightest prospects appear to be women. Hopefully they'll have better strategic sense than the man they might succeed.
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