Gaby Hinsliff The Guardian, Friday 19 September 2014
The mishandled no campaign in Scotland has left many questioning if Cameron can win the crunch battles ahead
Live blog: Thursday’s Scottish referendum developments
‘Four years in, Conservative backbenchers are losing faith in David Cameron’s ability to wing it.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
For days now, the grumbling in Tory circles has been growing louder: a low, angry chorus muttering that, whatever happens, it’s all David Cameron’s flipping fault. Although flipping isn’t the word they use. When it first began looking as if Scotland might be heading for independence, his party’s anger with him was understandably intense. Even when the consensus shifted back to maybe no-by-a-whisker, his apparent complacency still annoyed them.
But what’s striking is that even when rumours began flying that it might be a firmer no, you could still find Tory MPs wholly unable to forgive a leader who many feel did too little for too long, before panicking and doing too much too late.
It’s not the fact that he offered Scotland extra powers at the last minute that has annoyed English Tories, so much as the back-of-a-fag-packet inelegance with which the deal was presented, and the fact that he seems to have kept so few bargaining chips in reserve. To them, Cameron has resembled nothing so much as the husband who only remembers his wife’s birthday with minutes to spare, and then chucks a bucket load of cash at the problem while praying she never sees the credit card bill.
Well, it will all be over soon. But whatever may or may not happen to the union once the votes have been counted, there are reasons to fear for the future of David Cameron.
Even hardened Tory troublemakers balk at trying to oust him this close to a general election, and not just because many of them would rather wait for Boris Johnson to be in the running. “He’s as close to toast as he’ll ever be,” said one yesterday, a little forlornly, “but the irony is that he’ll remain because nobody wants a change of leader now.” But calls for a change in the style of leadership are a different matter.
It’s become a bit of a cliché to accuse the prime minister of treating government like it’s an undergraduate essay crisis, with everything tackled at 10 minutes to midnight in a caffeine-fuelled blur. Cameron is neither so dim nor so thoughtless as he’s sometimes painted, and nor is he the only senior politician ever secretly reduced to crossing fingers and hoping for the best. But he has now flown so often by the seat of his pants that they’re getting worryingly threadbare. Too often he has either busked his way to the “right” result for all the wrong reasons, or got the wrong result for what were frankly good reasons – namely that he didn’t deserve to win.
We may never know for sure whether Britain missed its best chance to stop Islamic State (Isis) last summer, when parliament was hustled towards military action over Syria and declined. But if Ed Miliband, and those MPs of all parties who followed suit, were wrong not to give the green light to airstrikes at the time, then they were arguably wrong for all the right reasons. No prime minister can reasonably expect to bounce MPs into military action in the Middle East any more without demonstrating clear understanding of and planning for the likely consequences, and Downing Street simply didn’t give itself time or space to make the case.
If history proves on the other hand that we were right to stay out of Syria – that western invention would only have triggered a bigger regional confrontation, that Isis or something like it would have hatched somewhere else instead, that thousands of lives would have been lost either way – then it was the right decision reached arguably more by accident than design, one taken amid some procedural confusion and more in fear of history repeating itself than on its own merits.
No wonder that vote remains something many MPs struggle to feel good about, whichever side they were on. No wonder they are approaching this autumn’s looming decision over Syria and Iraq with such caution. As one Conservative MP who strongly supports airstrikes told me yesterday, when it comes to bringing others with him, Cameron is “already on the back foot because of the disastrous way he handled Syria last year. It’s backfired. Everybody knows it.”
The danger is that this mistrust goes much wider. Four years in, Conservative backbenchers are losing faith in Cameron’s ability to wing it, as he has done over everything from the AV referendum – in retrospect, a gamble he was lucky to pull off – to Libya, where the results have been bloodier and far more uncertain. Having seen the clumsiness with which Downing Street handled a Scottish referendum it could see coming a mile off, who is now confident that Cameron has a fool proof and detailed master plan up his sleeve to negotiate the return of powers from a reluctant EU, and win a far more difficult referendum on staying in Europe?
Having watched Cameron struggle for an answer to anti-establishment politics in Scotland, would you as a Tory MP trust him to get UKIP off your back? Does it seem more or less likely that he will be going to the United Nations shortly with a watertight, meticulously calibrated, long-term plan for tackling Isis that won’t fall apart under pressure? These are huge decisions that could not be more in the national interest.
It would be manifestly unfair to blame Cameron for everything that went wrong in Scotland. He was right to let Labour lead the no campaign, rather than have it contaminated by the “effing Tories”. It’s hardly his fault that there were tensions within the shadow cabinet over how to go about it, or that Labour’s roots in Scotland no longer reach as deep as it likes to think. (On which note, with a YouGov poll this week showing the Greens creeping to within a point or so of the Liberal Democrats, is it crazy to think Miliband will one day have a left-wing rival for the votes of the young and restless down south too?)
The slow death of Scottish conservatism and collapse of faith in the political establishment that have together made things so hard for Number 10 to manage this campaign are trends Cameron has failed to reverse, but they certainly didn’t start or end with him. And while English Tory MPs may be furious at the way devo max was brusquely sprung on their constituents at the last minute, they might have been even angrier had it been included on the ballot paper from the start and allowed Alex Salmond to split the no vote down the middle.
But there is a portion of blame that Cameron will know is his alone. Like many extremely bright people, he has a faith in his ability to pull something out of the bag in a crisis that is sometimes well-founded. (He is only the Tory leader today because, after initially trailing David Davis in the leadership contest, he managed to get it together at the eleventh hour – and prime minister only because he took the enormous risk of going into coalition.) But it’s a faith no longer widely shared by others. Sometimes it doesn’t take a confidence vote to know when you are failing to command it.
