Playing down budget expectations: bracing for trouble
The Budget is more or less written and the signs are it is not going to excite those Tories hoping for eye-catching tax cuts.
David Cameron will give a speech tomorrow trying to “set the context” his team says (or “lower expectations,” if you prefer). The Prime Minister feels he’s having enough of a job painting in the 2015-16 spending round cuts without adding to them to fund some fresh income tax cuts.
Some Tory MPs openly admit that they’re making what they know to be unachievable demands on the Chancellor in order to prepare the ground for a no confidence vote in David Cameron in May.
They are being told by others, some who share the eventual objective, that they should stay their hand until they have more like 146 supporters, not the 46 required to write to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee demanding a contest. A revolt of 46 or so would be snuffed out after a lost vote and David Cameron would carry on wounded but immovable.
It is hard to see the rebels getting to a big number but there’s a decent chance that at some point between May this year and the summer of next year, enough may try to force the issue.
Not surprisingly, Tory strategy looks like it’s in a bit of flux right now, to put it politely – I thought Janan Ganesh captured it superbly here in an article for the Financial Times. [requires subscription].
George Osborne has told friends he recognises he must focus entirely on not repeating the errors of the last Budget and has not been as influential as usual in recent political discussions.
Lynton Crosby is now felt as a serious force in the Tory leadership already, even though he is very much part-time at the moment. It was his company’s polling and his views that shaped the Conservative campaign in Eastleigh.
It might have been difficult to mount a very different campaign once Maria Hutchings was selected as the Tory candidate, given her “Ukippy” views. But Eastleigh was a dry run for the sort of campaign that Lynton Crosby has been suggesting the Tories nationally need to roll out, focusing on issues where the party has a poll advantage and which concern the voters.
Lynton Crosby has long dismissed the idea that he is a “core vote” strategist and points to the Boris Johnson Mayoral contest as one proof of that.
But whether it’s because of the Aussie Svengali, fear of a coup attempt, incomplete modernisation or panic, there is a lurch to the right in the government’s propaganda.
The drum is being beaten this week on how the government will repel all boarders against what Ken Clarke mocked as the image of “Bulgar hordes.” The working assumption amongst some Cabinet ministers I’ve spoken to is that the numbers will be managable not, as Iain Duncan Smith accidentally said in the Commons yesterday, “a crisis.”
But the Conservatives find themselves collectively feeding the fears and raising expectations of a watertight solution.
Ben Brogan reports this morning on a possible joint ticket between Theresa May and Philip Hammond if David Cameron were to fall off his perch. One government aide I bumped into responded that it was hard to see who was the Joe Biden-style “empathy wing” of that particular ticket.
The PM clearly had one or both of them, perhaps Chris Grayling too in mind when he told Cabinet colleagues yesterday to keep their spending negotiations behind closed doors. At the Conservative Political Cabinet just beforehand, Chris Grayling said ministers should make sure they tell their colleagues what they’re thinking before going public on policy and Philip Hammond called for greater message discipline.
“You couldn’t make it up,” one person listening observed. That must be a frequent feeling in No. 10 these days.
Follow @GaryGibbonBlog on Twitter.