David Cameron and George Osborne have been joined at the hip in their faltering project to return the Conservatives to power. So George Osborne's decision to distance himself from Tory 'uber-modernisers' on the eve of the party conference will inevitably be viewed as an extraordinary and thinly veiled attack by the shadow chancellor on his own leader.
Still, Cameron and Osborne did want to be the Blair and Brown of their generation.
The Spectator's Fraser Nelson writes that "a phalanx of senior Tories are quietly preparing themselves for the ritual slaying of yet another leader" in Blackpool. But the party should pull together, seeking to project a confidence that it does not feel. As Iain Dale argues, there is an imperative to unite or die.
But this fear of public division means that the Conservative Party cannot, this week, hold the debate which it needs. Whistling a happy tune will not resolve the party's strategic dilemma. It is easy to see how to reunify an anxious Conservative Party but it is a prescription which points in the opposite direction to the one the party needs, if it is to reach out to the voters. 'Rebalancing' the modernising message with more emphasis on true-blue themes may play well internally, but risks simply reinforcing the 'flip-flop' image which seems to have stuck with the public.
David Cameron's core insight is spot on - that his party must come to terms with modern Britain in a modern 'global' world, if it is to contend seriously for power. His real problem is not the 'ubermodernising' agenda but that there are so few, if any, bright ubermodernisers at all apart from Zac Goldsmith. Where are the organised voices on the centre-right who are ahead of the party leadership, helping to create the intellectual and political space in which a modern centre-right agenda might be defined? A party can not be changed solely from the top.
Those Tory modernisers who use Philip Gould's book as a set text, accept his narcissistic description of New Labour being the creation of five people. This misses the battles fought by Labour's modernisers for over a decade before Blair. Neil Kinnock confronted the Militant tendency. Internally, John Smith (supported by Prescott) reformed the party voting system and externally he embraced constitutional reform and human rights. A new generation of women symbolised the cultural shift while the Party moved from being anti to be pro-Europe. Crucially, there was the intellectual rethinking of social justice by David Miliband and Patricia Hewitt at IPPR, consistent with the political strategy for tackling Labour's 'Southern Discomfort' as set out in Giles Radice's Fabian pamphlet series. The new leadership was then able to change gear on all fronts - replacing a "how much must we change if we want to win" mentality with a "breakout strategy" rewarded by the scale of Labour's two landslides. Blair's 'clause four' moment was a tactical masterstroke - but it was also the conclusion to the real work of change.
By contrast, Cameron had to start from scratch, and may face his moment of judgment after two years. The project has been too shallow with no defining idea, beyond electability, as to what the modernising project is or who it is for. There has been no clear argument as to what this would offer the country, or, beyond the Tory political class seeking a route back to power, no social group that can hear its concerns articulated by the modernising message.
The Tory think-tanks have struggled to contribute because the intellectual energy on the right remains devoted to the big idea of the last 30 years: less State. Cameron's electoral project points in the opposite direction.
He has no intention of re-running the last two elections where Tory frontbenchers Oliver Letwin and Howard Flight have been banished for hinting at future spending cuts. Hence his rejection of alternative social insurance models for healthcare, his ambivalence about tax cuts and his acceptance of Labour spending plans which all on the right regard as excessively bloated. This means there is no intellectual petrol in the Tory modernising tank. The message still appears to be "we'd love to slash the state but the voters won't buy it".
Cameron's big idea - social responsibility - seeks to paper over this faultline in the New Conservative project. His defining soundbite - 'There is such a thing as society, it is just not the same as the state' - triangulates, combining an apparent repudiation of Thatcher's lack of concern for social issues with an endorsement of the traditional Tory critique of the welfare state. It is, in fact, precisely the point Thatcher herself was trying to make in her infamous Woman's Own interview. What remains ambiguous is whether his project is going to break with Thatcherism, or simply to rebrand and rehabilitate it for a gentler age. That is why the next post-election Tory inquest will be a pitched battle between those who want to return to the true faith - a tried and failed approach - and those who argue that the party must continue down the modernising path, but this time really mean it. Even if they should win the coming election, this battle will have to be fought out - and the media and the electorate sense its uncertainty.
The Tory tradition of Disraeli, Churchill and Macmillan is one which accepts and adapts to social changes which it has tried, and failed, to resist. The great challenge in articulating a modern centre-right conservatism would be to accept the limits on 'rolling back the state' from broadly current levels. Will the next Tory leader make a clear statement that 'the era of minimal government is over'?
Today, whether the issue is climate change or national security, economic regulation after Northern Rock, childcare or crime, housing or consumer protection; political and media pressure on any specific issue is usually for government to do more, not less. To argue for better or smarter government is quite different from arguing for less government. Those calls come as often from the right as the left. Hence Gordon Brown's strategy to maintain his electoral coalition - his 'big tent' is pegged around a belief in mutual obligation which can appeal to left egalitarians and social conservatives.
If Margaret Thatcher offered what Andrew Gamble called "the free economy and the strong state" then Brown might be seen as offering "the fair society and the protective state". He must resolve some important tensions to do this. He has delivered egalitarian redistribution within the constraints of liberal economics, but must show how this approach can deal with runaway inequality at the top. He will inherit the Blair government's reputation as socially authoritarian if he does not deliver substantively on his commitment to much greater transparency, accountability and decentralisation. He is careful to emphasise that he sees the state as the sole 'guarantor' of social justice, not the only deliverer of it, and so would not rule out a much greater role for civil society and alternative providers.
But Brown's agenda is rooted in the necessary, positive and benign power of government. The centre-right's instinct is to reject this as a failed big state agenda. Much of the liberal centre would be wary too. Vince Cable told a Fabian fringe at last week's Labour conference that this was the defining philosophical difference between Labour and the LibDems.
Many on the right would argue that 'freedom' should trump 'fairness'. (Brown's counter-argument is that fairness is needed to expand freedom, to extend substantive opportunity to those denied it). But while articulating an agenda rooted in economic and social liberalism would be a natural approach for a modern centre-right, it could give Brown the public 'dividing line' which he wants to put to the public - 'government on your side' against 'government off your back'.
The outlines of an alternative agenda for the right are not yet easy to discern. Politically, there would need to be as serious an engagement with Tory 'urban discomfort' in the north as Labour had of its 'southern discomfort' challenge in the 1990s. Intellectually, the heavy lifting would be around defining a 21st century centre-right account of the scope and limits of governance - at both the national level and multilaterally. Could the next generation of British Conservatives contribute to the mainstream European centre-right, rather than seeking to withdraw from it? If the right were to take its commitment to meritocracy seriously, it would put together an evidence-based analysis of the barriers to opportunity, of the sort which David Willetts attempted over grammar schools, rather than relying on its instincts about family and social breakdown. Rather than bemoaning all recent constitutional changes as acts of political vandalism from the left, the right would need a constructive agenda covering what it believes a new constitutional settlement for Britain should look like. The party might even reconsider its devotion to an electoral system so heavily biased against it
If the Conservatives do lose the next election, they should deepen, not abandon, the Cameron project. Britain needs a modern centre-right. A healthy democracy requires a credible challenge to power. No government can stave off political mortality for ever, and political change is finally embedded when you convert your opponents and shift the centre of political gravity, as both Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher did. The next election, perhaps later than most people think, could provide a true realigning moment in British politics, is it sparks the new thinking that Britain really needs and answers what the centre-right in British politics is for.
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