In her blog today, the Herald's Audrey Young links to Andrew Rawnsley's piece in the Guardian about the trials of UK Conservative leader David Cameron. Elected as a "modernising conservative", Cameron initially gained some success in the polls by seekign to take the Tories away from the bitter legacy of Thatcher and back towards the political centre (and incidentally, to the left of New labour under Blair). But after facing setbacks in the polls since Blair's departure, he has swung sharply to the right and focused on the usual Tory fixations of tax cuts, crime, and immigration. While this has drawn applause from the tabloids and the unreconstructed conservatives in his party, it also seems to be a recipe for electoral disaster. As Rawnsley points out, the Tories have fought three elections on those issues - and lost all three. With Cameron following the same path, that could become four.
Young's contribution is to point out that Key has in many ways modelled himself on Cameron, and has pursued the same path of dragging his party towards the centre rather from its previous extreme right-wing agenda under Don Brash. The difference is that this strategy is working in New Zealand.
My question though is whether it will continue to. The polls are likely to narrow as the election approaches, and this may see Key facing the same pressure from his right as Cameron has. It will be interesting to see then whether he sticks to the centre ground, or swerves hard right in an effort to appease his "base". The pressure on Key to do the latter is likely to be intense, firstly because National's major donors are the same free market radicals who bankrolled Labour and then National in the 80's and 90's and want to restart the Revolution, and secondly because his front bench is still stacked with the toxic legacy of the 90's. Bill English, Tony Ryall, Murray McCully, Lockwood Smith, Nick Smith and Maurice Williamson all held key positions in the Bolger and Shipley governments which ruined our society. None have resiled from the policies they pursued then or apologised for the damage they caused, and all appear to be unrconstructed Douglasites. While some may have got the message that their policies of tax cuts for the rich funded by privatisation and cuts to health and education for the poor are pure poison with the electorate, some are still True Believers under the delusion that if they just shout louder we'll all forget what those policies did to us and come round.
The second question is how credible Key's efforts to soften National's image can be when the party is still financially and politically dominated by Revolutionaries. And looking at their policy of strategic emptiness, of fudging their position in an attempt to be all things to all people (and incidentally hide their real intentions), I think the answer is "not very". If National really has changed, then Key should have no trouble in stating clearly that he will not seek to restart the Revolution or pursue 90's style policies. The fact that he hasn't speaks IMHO speaks volumes about his intentions.
