Cameron: ‘I’m not complicated’

Way back in late July, Cameron aides talked about this conference and this speech as a moment to reset the political agenda.

Life hasn’t really turned out that way. The Tories have had a perfectly ok week – dissidents on message, no disasters. But the grim economic backdrop and the relative smoothness of their rivals’ conferences – especially Labour’s – mean it’s hard to see that today’s speech can have much impact beyond steadying some Tory nerves.

The main message? We have a plan (unlike the other lot) and it will get better if you stick with it. Problem is, the journey gets longer and longer and the children in the back are calling out for Opal Fruits.

The PM will say: there’s “nothing complicated about me.” I’m not sure that was ever the query. The worry you hear repeatedly from Tories in particular is that he’s a bit effete, no fire in the belly or, as one school contemporary said: “The thing you have to understand about David is he achieved 75% of his political ambition the day he became Prime Minister.”

Of course, his allies would argue, and point to what George Osborne called the “silent revolution” going on in schools, welfare, public services. But it’s a measure of some kind of problem internally and with the wider public, that seven  years after he won the Tory Party leadership, David Cameron is still having to tell people who he is.

The personal sections of the speech talk about his father and about his own belief in “working hard, caring for my family and serving my country.” The message is: I may not have gone to a comprehensive, I may be super privileged, but my life has some of the outlines of your own.

There was, by the way, a wee flurry in the briefing rooms at conference last night as the section of the speech suggesting that mending the economy wasn’t complicated were being interpreted by some journalists, perhaps a little mischievously, as the PM saying it’s simple to fix the economy. So why haven’t you done it if it’s simple? A brief panic broke out…but this has been a low-key closing to a low-key mid-term conference season. The politicians didn’t have much to say and they said it at length.

Will the rumours about Andrew Mitchell going this week amount to anything? I think Andrew Mitchell will only go when he is told to by the PM or George Osborne. Just reading the papers he will think that there are some vendettas going on – some by journalists or colleagues he’s hacked off. The PM himself won’t want to end a week that has given him decent publicity by reminding everyone that a senior Tory is accused of calling the police “plebs.”

Why do I mention George? The Chancellor has always had a bond with Andrew Mitchell. In the 2005 leadership contest the two men had some kind of shared lifeboat pact – signalling they’d look after each other if the other guy’s candidate won (Andrew Mitchell was running the David Davis campaign). I hear at the height of the campaign  the two men joked  to each other “why don’t we just go off and set up a hedge fund.”