Cassilis

One the day Tony Blair stood down I predicted a brown bounce through the summer, volatility in the polls during conference season and possible changes at the helm of the Liberal Democrats depending on election timing. Buoyed by this reasonable hit rate I'm taking a stab at what the next 3/6 months might bring for each of the parties (a mixture of hopes and fears in all cases).

For Gordon Brown & Labour the wise advice would be to see out the year in a relatively low gear and take time to regroup. As everyone's now aware after recent events the timing of the poll is in Brown's hands so he shouldn't panic about regaining the initiative. The EU Treaty negotiations will see a renewed onslaught from the Conservatives and the right-wing press so I suspect he'll be content (in relative terms) to write of the next couple of months and just face off to whatever gets thrown his way. Whether he's 'written off' the next 14 weeks or not I also suspect he'll already have convened a team to look at some sort of blitz of policy initiative (nicked or otherwise) and announcements come Jan '08. Wouldn't be surprised if we saw an announcement on an independent inquiry into the Iraq war at this stage either. By this point he'll also have more detail behind any attack he plans to launch against the Tory tax proposals on IHT and non-doms (assuming it's there) and all this will add up to decent pop at regaining the control he's clearly lost in recent weeks. It also serves as decent prep for a snap poll in the spring which, contrary to the way is was reported by most sources he didn't actually rule out 10 days ago.

Cameron and the Tories need to take a reality check and avoid letting recent good fortune become an excuse for complacency. Even in the polls that cite a healthy Tory lead Brown still hammers Cameron in the 'most capable PM' stakes and that needs to change if the party is to win an election. The key focus is obviously policy and after almost two years of 'consultation and formulation' there needs to be many more sentences beginning with the phrase 'The next Conservative government will...' followed by tangible measures that lay people can understand platitudes and generalities won't cut it. The green agenda has been profitable (in electoral terms) for Cameron and he needs to turn this into specific policies that the public come to associate with the party. The contradictions coming out of the 6 policy forums need to be resolved quickly and Cameron needs yet more work on the defining theme stuff around why people should vote Tory ('because Brown's rubbish' isn't a vision). Whether I'm right about the timing above at some point Labour will relaunch and the Tories need to be ready and make sure they're not wrong-footed by it. For a similar (if more coherent) view on what needs to be done worth drawing attention again to Iain Dale's piece in last Friday's Telegraph...

As for the Liberal Democrats who knows? From what I gather it's Nick Clegg's to lose and he's usually described as being on the right of the party. Might be a trite and obvious point but I've always felt the Lib Dems problem was their readiness to define themselves in relation to Labour & the Conservatives rather than a party with fixed points of political principle - that's probably unfair and I accept those principles are there but almost every sentence uttered by a prominent Lib Dem opens with the phrase "unlike Labour and the Tories" and this actually creates a mental divide in the minds of the electorate between parties that form governments and parties that just harry and oppose them.

Labels: Politics