BRING OUT YOUR PORN:

Beached and powerless: The Conservative party entered this campaign as the underdog. That is what it remains (Max Hastings, May 6, 2005, The Guardian)

The Conservatives did not make extravagant promises, for a modern party knows that voters will not swallow them. In 1997, for all Tony Blair's masterly rhetoric, essentially he offered the British people the maintenance of Tory economic prudence, with better public services and without the sleaze. In 2005, Michael Howard offered voters a change of prime minister, with policies not drastically different from those of Labour.

This was not nearly enough to swing a general election away from a ruling party that has delivered prosperity. Britain's natural political condition is inertia. It takes a lot to rouse the electorate to risk exchanging one group of chronically suspect politicians for another. It is easy to perceive why voters acted to expel incumbent governments in 1945, 1951, 1979 and 1997, in all these cases reaching pretty just verdicts.

Roy Jenkins used to argue that the exceptions, the unfair modern British poll results, came about in 1970 and 1974, when the electorate might have been expected to stick with the parties of government and did not do so. The general principle obtains, however, that a government has got to make the British people very cross indeed before they throw it out.

In 2005, Iraq never looked an issue that could break the Blair administration. Much has been made of the antipathy between Blair and Gordon Brown, and the absurdity of their charade of unity. Yet during the campaign Labour's frontbench produced an impressive display of purpose and coherence. They looked every inch men and women who enjoy the experience of power far too much to put it at risk.

Howard likewise imposed an iron discipline on his party, with not a candidate rocking the boat after the exemplary execution of Howard Flight. Yet the party suffers a desperate shortage of heavyweight performers, big beasts of the jungle. Who could have failed to notice the loneliness of the Tories' most popular veteran, Ken Clarke?

There he was, once again stumping the streets of his Nottingham constituency, which was doing duty for St Helena as far as the Tory leadership was concerned. Howard and his strategists did not want Ken anywhere near the national stage. He, alone among the Tories, might have blown the gaff, exposing the reality that Howard's Conservatives constitute a rightwing party, dry enough to grow cacti.

Though Europe has been pushed down the Tory agenda so far as to have become almost invisible, the ridiculous promise to renegotiate Britain's membership of the EU lurks like a cache of internet pornography. [...]

In a sulphurous Channel 4 interview on Wednesday night, Howard responded to Jon Snow's wife-beating question about whether the Tories had changed from being the "nasty party": "Of course we've changed. We recognise that if we want to have the world-class health service we deserve, the world-class education system we deserve, we've got to spend money."

Snow asked: "Does that mean you've become the party of big government?" Howard said lamely: "No, we're committed to a smaller government." He sounded like a prophet seeking to lead a jihad who then explains that no participant will need to march further than Bognor.

Tories were perfectly entitled to attack the government's failure to control asylum seekers and immigration, if this had been a mere minor theme in a symphonic presentation of Britain's future. As it was, however, the Conservative party spent its campaign making big promises on small things, while offering only a tweak of the controls on big ones.

In their desperation to make only pledges that might be fulfilled, the Tories were obliged tacitly to acknowledge that it was impossible to outflank a Labour government that is in so many respects a conservative one.

You don't have to be Karl Rove to know that a party that hides and misplays its most popular issues doesn't win elections.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2005 10:26 PM