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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
David Cameron was not a centrist, but he did a remarkably good job of playing one on television. For six years as prime minister, he successfully posed as a middle-of-the-road Boden dad. The reality — a series of radical reforms across the state, significant tax cuts and reductions in public spending — was rather different.
Cameron had a series of strengths that are often mistaken for centrism, but aren’t. He has a natural ability to see his opponent’s point of view and find vulnerabilities in it — something that his successor-but-three, Rishi Sunak, badly lacks. Sunak was recently left unable to give an answer when an interviewer asked him to say something positive about Sir Keir Starmer: not a question that Cameron would have struggled with. The former premier was able to see, too, when the other side had done something worth stealing: not for nothing is the biggest public policy achievement of his government the English education system, where he borrowed from Tony Blair, who had in turn borrowed from Kenneth Baker.
As prime minister, Cameron recognised that times had changed and brought his party up to date and back to the mainstream on social issues such as gay marriage. When the now foreign secretary attends cabinet meetings, he sits opposite one of his very tangible legacies: the first British-Indian prime minister, Sunak. And Cameron was able to combine all those abilities to help him run a stable and effective government even while in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
Like many long-running performances, however, the gloss has worn off for many of his fans, who have never forgiven him for how the series ended. (Spoiler alert: the hero leaves the EU by mistake in the end.) But the collective memory of the government he led still casts a spell over Westminster.
The most visible aspects of that can be found in the Conservative party. Talk to Tory MPs contemplating the end of 13 years in office, and after a while, some will suggest that they didn’t really ever get a fair crack of the whip. The first five years were spent in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Cameron’s final year was dominated by the referendum, while every one of his replacements has been involved in firefighting (though some were moonlighting as arsonists on the side).
But the reality is that the coalition government was, by any standard, effective, competent and right wing. As chancellor, George Osborne delivered significant tax cuts for individuals and reduced the size and scope of the state. The UK’s benefits system, never particularly generous, is now among the most parsimonious in the OECD.
Yes, the UK’s tax burden is the largest since the 1940s: but that is because of a series of geopolitical crises, as well as upward pressures on the cost of healthcare, which are being experienced globally. To imply that there is room for further reductions in what the government does and the services it provides to British citizens, or that the Conservatives have been some kind of gleefully high-tax administration, is to deny the reality of how the country was governed from 2010 to 2016.
What the Tories and the UK both badly need is to be led by someone who saw the coalition for what it was: a radical government whose changes needed to be followed by a period of relative stability and calm. That’s not to say that subsequent governments need not have done anything: John Major, who followed a revolutionary period in government rather more successfully than Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Sunak were able to, still found time to privatise the UK’s railways, introduce the National Lottery and take steps towards peace in Northern Ireland. But his government was accompanied by a recognition that you couldn’t have revolution forever.
It’s not a coincidence that the Conservative party’s only post-Cameron era political success came from a politician who recognised that the coalition’s record had created plenty of losers. The major argument for Brexit offered by the Vote Leave campaign, of which Johnson was the figurehead, was that it would lead to an increase in NHS spending — and his 2019 campaign pledged to turn the spending taps back on after a decade of restraint. But Johnson never had the patience to realise those promises in a meaningful way, and both his replacements, in different ways, believed the mythmaking around Cameron’s record. Truss thought Cameron’s cabinet had been cautious on tax-cutting, and proposed a programme of unfunded tax cuts as a result. Sunak says that he doesn’t believe that the state should keep getting bigger and bigger — ignoring the fact that the UK government does less than it did in 2010.
The Conservative party’s collective amnesia regarding 2010-16 is part of why the Tories are now mired in fantasy and heading for defeat. But the coalition’s successful pulverising of Labour on tax-and-spend still lives with the opposition, too. It is a big part of why Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are so obsessed with establishing Labour’s bona fides on tax-and-spend, and also why they have, thus far, enthusiastically pledged to stay within the fiscal straitjacket designed by Jeremy Hunt. Neither party has even come close to accepting just how radical and significant the Cameron-Clegg government really was.