Lessons to be learned from a ‘difficult week’

As dry runs for the biggest spending review in decades go, this week’s party conference was not entirely smooth. David Cameron can, however, draw a couple of easy lessons from a difficult week.

Firstly, that policy decisions made in haste usually unravel at leisure. Secondly, newspapers read (and written) mostly by the middle classes will always emphasise threats to middle class prosperity over the threats to poorer welfare claimants he hoped would be the headline.

But Cameron’s decision to spend his keynote speech once again outlining his grand vision of a reshaped state suggests he’s pondering a trickier question: have the Conservatives done enough to secure a mandate for the cuts they’ll shortly unveil?

Technically, manifestos provide a mandate: say what you’re going to do, and voters can’t complain if you do it. Fail to mention something that you later wish to rely on, and all bets are off. Mandates are difficult for coalitions, as Cameron hinted yesterday by suggesting he had wanted a harder line on Europe and the family. But he is the ‘big brother’ in this partnership, the heavier influence on the coalition’s programme.

So when Ed Miliband and the prime minister face each other across the dispatch box for the first time next week, the Labour charge may well be about broken promises. Why did the Conservatives say before the election they had no plans to scrap child benefit, or raise VAT, yet promptly do both?

But this government is hardly the first to break a promise. Tony Blair twice pledged a referendum on PR which twice didn’t happen: tuition fees were introduced in defiance of a promise.

And modern campaign politics now relies more on mood music than manifestos, sketching the character of the kind of government you’ll be. The two personality traits David Cameron and George Osborne most consistently emphasised were austerity (promising pain ahead) and fairness (pain shared across social groups).

In private, Osborne has sometimes worried they weren’t explicit enough about the pain: but so far the big picture holds broadly true. The scale of cuts threatened in departmental budgets surprised some voters, but arguably the warnings were there. The Budget was, in the IFS’s analysis, hardest on the poor but could be balanced by imminent announcements affecting middle income Britons: public service job losses, sharp rises in tuition fees, and making public sector workers pay more towards their pensions.

But what hit Cameron this week seems to have been a sense that while the Tories have stuck largely to the letter of the deal, they haven’t stuck to what many traditional Conservatives felt was its spirit.

Whatever was said about sharing the pain, these voters subconsciously expect him to look after ‘people like us’: people like, for example, stay at home mothers married to relatively well-off husbands. The political success of the spending review now rests partly on it fitting the mandate these voters believe they actually gave him.