It’s not as easy as it looks for David Cameron’s Conservatives,
writes donald malcolm |
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It was a great week to be a Tory when the Labour Party self-destructed and then - icing on the cake - Charles Clarke tore into his next party leader, calling Gordon Brown a "control freak" and worse.
Michael Portillo, the former Conservative defence secretary, duly gave thanks to Labour activists at a conference on Saturday organised by the Blairite Progress magazine.
Yet Portillo made it clear that the Blair-Brown explosion did not mean he was recanting his view that David Cameron will lose the next election.
And the next morning, interviewed on TV by Andrew Marr, Cameron's shadow foreign secretary William Hague was also quick to hose down Tory euphoria. Conservatives, he said, could not rely on Labour turmoil to deliver victory; they had to press on with reform of their own party.
This Tory caution is well-founded. While the |
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Michael Portillo has not recanted his view that David Cameron will lose the
next election |
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public may be thinking - and telling pollsters - it's perhaps time to give the Tories a chance, Cameron has four mountains to climb. Together they provide a huge obstacle to victory at the next general election (probably 2009), whatever Labour's top brass gets up to in the meantime.
First, the Conservatives have to regroup and modernise at the constituency level. It is much harder - and more expensive - for a local party that has no MP to get its act together.
As for finding popular candidates who can beat Labour and Lib Dem rivals, Cameron is having only faltering success in getting more women and ethnic minority candidates accepted.
According to the right-wing website Conservativehome, Cameron's main device - the centrally-vetted A-list - is making little difference. For example, the proportion of ethnic minority candidates remains at 4.3 per cent - just two out of 46.
Mountain number two is Ming Campbell's Lib Dems. There are now 50-plus Lib Dem MPs,  |
