The Tories (like Labour) are heading for the graveyard. But an unlikely hero shows how Cameron and his toff friends can save their party writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK
Another week, another by-election. From the Battle of Medway, Ukip marches on past the twitching corpses of the mainstream political parties, loudly banging the drums of victory.
With Westminster swirling with rumours about more possible Tory defections, Labour’s Shadow Cabinet in meltdown and the Lib Dems struggling to finish ahead of the Monster Raving Loonies, British politics seems more rudderless than at any time in living memory.
And through it all, Nigel Farage strides on, pint in hand, defying the critics who once wrote him off.
Following Ukip's victory in Rochester rumours have been swirling about more Tory defections, Labour has gone into meltdown, while the Lib Dems barely finished ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party
The really extraordinary thing about the Rochester and Strood by-election was that nobody was in the least surprised by the result.
Indeed, perhaps Ukip’s greatest achievement is that political observers now expect them to win, even in parts of the country that might have been thought inhospitable to their message.
In many ways, Mark Reckless’s victory was even more impressive than his friend Douglas Carswell’s triumph in Clacton last month.
Yes, Mr Reckless was the sitting MP, having sensationally defected from the Conservatives during their party conference.
But in 2010, the Tories had won a whopping majority of 9,000 votes in Rochester. Far from the Kent constituency being natural Ukip territory, it was only 271st on their target list.
The really extraordinary thing about the Rochester and Strood by-election was that nobody was in the least surprised by the result
And as many experts wondered yesterday, if Nigel Farage’s motley crew can win there, then where can they be stopped?
For the major political parties, meanwhile, the night was an utter humiliation.
The Lib Dems, who purport to be a serious national party, won just 349 votes, finishing less than 1 per cent of the total.
To put that into context, they only just scraped into fifth, behind the Greens and just ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party.
For Labour, meanwhile, the headlines have been rightly dreadful. The hapless Ed Miliband wrote off the seat almost immediately when the by-election was called.
Yet as recently as 2005 it was core Labour territory, and was held for 13 years by the maverick Bob Marshall-Andrews.
By common consent, Labour had an excellent candidate in Naushabah Khan. But the party’s failure to win more than a feeble 17 per cent of the vote speaks volumes about Mr Miliband’s pitiful failure to reach the ordinary working-class voters of southern England.
As for the controversial tweet by his Shadow Cabinet colleague, Emily Thornberry, which mockingly pictured a Rochester house adorned with a white van and Cross of St George flags, it says a great deal about the sneering, snobbish attitudes of Mr Miliband and his metropolitan cronies.
As the house’s owner, Dan Ware, remarked: ‘She’s a snob. What’s she got, a three-storey townhouse in Islington?’
He was right about that. A former human rights lawyer, Ms Thornberry owns a house worth an estimated £3 million in, yes, Islington, North London.
Nigel Farage (left) strides on, pint in hand, past the twitching corpses of the mainstream political parties (including Tory candidate Kelly Tollhurst, right), defying the critics who once wrote him off
In fact, you could hardly find a better example of the patronising, self-satisfied attitude so common among the chattering-class luvvie Left, who love to sneer at the patriotism of less privileged English voters.
Given such attitudes, it is little wonder that Labour can barely attract the support of a third of the electorate nationwide — or that working-class voters in much of the South and Midlands have abandoned a party that, under Mr Miliband, too often seems like a glorified trade union for public-sector bureaucrats.
It is hard to think of a time when the so-called people’s party has been more desperately out of touch with the ordinary working people it claims to represent. As the Labour MP Simon Danczuk rightly remarked on Thursday, the incident merely confirms the view that ‘the Labour party has been hijacked by the North London liberal elite’.
For the Conservatives, Ms Thornberry’s tweet came as a welcome distraction. For weeks they had been boasting that Rochester was unlike Clacton, that Mr Reckless was beatable, and that they would stop the Ukip bandwagon.
But all this, as usual, was merely hot air. And since David Cameron’s party seems constitutionally incapable of stemming the haemorrhage to Ukip, it is increasingly hard to envisage them winning a clear, workable majority in May’s General Election.
We all know how we got here: the deepest recession since the war; the collapse of trust in the mainstream parties; the increasing detachment of the Westminster political class; the rising tide of public discontent about Europe and immigration; and so on.
The deeper question, though, is what it all means.
Taken together, the extraordinary popularity of both Ukip and the Scottish National Party — essentially, two populist groups offering simple solutions to complex problems — means that it is almost impossible for either Mr Cameron or Mr Miliband to win a clear majority at next year’s election.
The most plausible scenario, therefore, is that we will either have another Coalition, or one party will have to govern as a minority. Indeed, the government that forms in May could be so weak that we could easily have two elections in a year, which last happened in 1974.
Emily Thornberry's tweet says a great deal about the sneering, snobbish attitudes of Mr Miliband and his luvvie Left metropolitan cronies
So if you are sick of party deals cooked up in smoke-filled rooms; if you are tired of listening to rival ministers briefing against one another; and if you yearn for the smack of firm government, then I am afraid I have bad news for you. The next five years are almost certainly going to bring more of the same.
There is, I think, an obvious historical parallel with the last time when politics was so fragmented and confused, with elections deadlocked, MPs jumping from party to party and the establishment under pressure from maverick insurgents — the Twenties.
There were four elections in Britain between 1922 and 1929, a period when we had not a two-party system, but a four-party system — the Conservatives, the relatively new Labour Party, and two rival Liberal groups under the feuding ex-prime ministers H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George.
The overall picture, in other words, could hardly have been more chaotic. All in all, Britain had six different governments in just ten years. It was no wonder that the 1920s seemed an age of drift and inaction, with unemployment at more than 10 per cent and industry crippled by bitter strikes.
Amid all this confusion, the Tories found themselves challenged on the right by a host of Ukip-style insurgent groups, notably the Press baron Lord Beaverbrook’s Empire Free Trade Crusade, which won a famous victory at the Paddington by-election in 1930.
Then as now, critics on the Right pilloried the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, as a woolly moderate. Their issues were not Europe and immigration, but India, to which Baldwin wanted to give self-government, and import tariffs, which they thought would protect British industry.
Even Baldwin’s cousin, the writer and staunch Tory Rudyard Kipling, complained that Baldwin was ‘a socialist at heart’, which sounds very similar to what Ukip activists say today about David Cameron.
Stanley Baldwin is not widely remembered now, but was Prime Minister three times in the 20s and 30s, and he is who David Cameron should be studying
And yet if Mr Cameron wants to save his skin, unite his party and win over the British electorate, I believe Baldwin is precisely the man he should be studying this weekend.
For despite the criticism, it was Baldwin who emerged triumphant from the political chaos of the day, stamping his personality on the age and turning his beleaguered party into the most effective vote-winning machine in the Western world.
Today, he is not widely remembered, yet he was prime minister three times between 1923 and 1937, and led his party to massive landslide victories in 1924, 1931 and 1935. Indeed, many historians agree that Baldwin was by far the most effective peacetime politician of the early 20th century.
On the surface, Baldwin and Mr Cameron were remarkably similar. Like our current Prime Minister, Baldwin came from a privileged background.
The son of a Worcestershire industrialist, he went to Harrow School, where he famously got into hot water for writing schoolboy pornography.
He was a cautious, moderate, emollient man, mocked by his enemies as a lightweight. Old-school Tories often disliked his attempts to modernise his party, and saw him as a Left-winger in all but name.
Yet Baldwin was a committed Christian and a staunch patriot. After World War I, he anonymously donated a fifth of his family fortune — the equivalent of about £25 million today — to help pay down Britain’s war debt.
It is hard to imagine any of our party leaders doing that today, and completely impossible to imagine them doing it anonymously. In that respect, at least, our politicians have unquestionably changed for the worse.
Where Mr Cameron could really learn from his predecessor, though, is in his attitude to the insurgents on the Right, and in his ability to reach ordinary working-class voters.
Contrary to his critics’ claims, Baldwin was not a trimmer. On Indian self-government, for example, he stuck to his guns, even though it made him unpopular with his party die-hards.
But instead of sneering at the dissenters, he treated them with seriousness and respect. Meanwhile, he won national admiration by taking on the Ukip of his day at the Westminster St George’s by-election in 1931, which was effectively an ideological duel between Baldwin and Lord Beaverbrook.
Instead of cowering in his bunker, Baldwin stood up to his challengers, taking their ideas seriously, setting out his own position and winning plaudits for his courage and leadership.
If only Mr Cameron would do the same — and would tell us exactly what he stands for — I think the public would reward him for it.
Even more importantly, Baldwin was a master of something that completely eludes David Cameron and George Osborne: the ability to understand ordinary people who care nothing for the rituals of Westminster politics but simply want security and prosperity for themselves and their families.
Particularly on the radio, Baldwin was simply brilliant at reaching a mass audience. And like other successful Tory leaders, notably Margaret Thatcher, he was particularly good at appealing to voters who did not think of themselves as natural Conservatives.
‘I sometimes think that, if I were not leader of the Conservative party, I should like to be leader of the people who do not belong to any party,’ he told his listeners in 1935.
Above all, Baldwin knew that the Tory Party could only win elections if it represented the British working and middle classes: people who toiled hard and dreamed of better lives, not just those who were affluent already.
‘Never forget,’ he wrote on his retirement, ‘that the leaders of the Tory Party have always understood and been sympathetic to the working man.’ I think Mr Cameron ought to copy out those words and post them above his desk.
The problem, of course, is whether the Prime Minister is capable of learning the appropriate lesson is doubtful. He has led his party for almost a decade now, yet he and his Chancellor have never seemed able to transcend their privileged backgrounds and reach out to ordinary, non-partisan British families.
Like Cameron, Baldwin came from a privileged background, but unlike Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne, he managed to overcome that and reach out to working class voters
It is this social gulf, I think, that Ukip really exploits. They profit from a widespread belief that the Westminster elite are completely out of touch and care nothing for the voters of places such as Clacton and Rochester.
How would Stanley Baldwin have dealt with such a challenge?
He would have gone to Rochester and put his authority on the line — not by smearing and traducing his challengers, which is what the Tories tried to do to Ukip candidate Mark Reckless, but by setting out his own positive agenda.
He would have outlined his own vision for Britain, based on his quiet Christian faith, his heartfelt love of country and his passionate rural conservatism. And above all, he would have appealed to his ideal Tory voter, ‘the English working man’.
What he would not have done is describe people who are deeply worried about the country as ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ — or treated dissenters with such dismissive arrogance that he drove them into open revolt.
And, of course, unlike so many of today’s politicians, Baldwin would not have considered himself above appealing to men like the white van driver whose house appeared in Emily Thornberry’s sneering tweet.
Bridging the gulf between the people and the privileged was Baldwin’s mission and his greatest achievement. And only if David Cameron follows suit will he stand any chance of emulating his predecessor, seeing off his challengers and setting his stamp upon our age.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2844938/The-Tories-like-Labour-heading-graveyard-unlikely-hero-shows-Cameron-toff-friends-save-party-writes-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html#ixzz3JlJ6o3uk
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